He has a point. A complicated regex is complicated, and that can mean slow. It also by definition means "incomprehensible to humans", and so has to be generated by a tool, and then not touched or looked at.
Thankfully we have people like Loren to perform a fuzzy match on my obfuscated question. ;)
I was thinking "maintenance complexity" more than "runtime complexity", although simplifying the former would hopefully make the runtime more efficient.
