three big “oh, wow, I didn’t realize that” moments
That tells a lot. I’d personally interpret that as the commonly observed fact that Regular Expressions are vastly underestimated. They are far more powerful than they seem. And that would be Powerful as in Chainsaw, not just Powerful as in Biceps.
Like anything powerful it will hurt the one who wields it uncautiously.
By the way, @DevMan: that’s actually why the name is very good. It describes the academic properties of these expressions: RE (BRE or ERE) (much like indicators like LA(LR), LL(n) are used to indicate the power of a parser).
Like so many scientific notions, the name can be deceptive, for the uninformed