Quite right. I see two issues with regexes: funky syntax and some important and non-obvious limitations. If you want to use them, these two things add up to a considerable barrier to entry. There are many examples of trivial pattern-matching languages (DOS wildcards, UNIX wildcards and SQL text matching to name but three) that address both of these issues by being easy to grasp and surprisingly useful.

I haven't actually tried this, but it seems easy to grasp and I've spent enough time busting up delimited strings that "surprisingly useful" is plausible too.