In my one afternoon of experience with them, I have to agree with you. Of course, I am now finding that a few results are using double line breaks (<br><br>) instead of paragraphs, but that opens a much worse can of worms. I'm going with what I got. :)
They're powerful, but mastery of regexp eluded me. Or... I avoided it, perhaps.
My old boss (who quit, and whose job I have now) really, really wanted me to learn regexp and do my programming in perl. It came up on an annual review because I utterly disobeyed a direct order. There was a little gizmo that the accounting department needed that took a text file and manipulated it and spit out a new text file in the format they needed to send to their bank to cut payments by direct deposit. I think I've talked about it here before. It's the acronym I'm most proud of in my career: the Automated Clearing House Output Organizer [ACHOO]. The name of the program is, naturally, ACHOO.exe. There's just something wonderfully appropriate about that.
But my boss had specifically *ordered* me to develop this thing in perl, using my (assumed) new expertise in regular expressions.
I fought with perl for a couple of weeks on that thing, and just couldn't make it work. I knew I could do it in FoxPro in a heartbeat, and so I did. In only a couple of days I had a fully functional compiled exe that did exactly what they wanted, and as it would happen, is STILL used to this day.
He was really ticked about it. But the customer was happy.