Looking over the similar question which you mentioned and its answers, I saw a few attempts at creating "friendlier" alternative syntaxes, from both supporters and detractors of regexes as we know them today.
I found them to be uniformly less readable than equivalent regexes.
Now, granted, I am a regular user of regexes, so I'm sure my comfort with them is a significant part of this. But my primary problem with them was not unfamiliarity, but rather that they quickly grew too large to take in all at once. When your 20-character regex becomes a 10-line-by-30-column pseudo-English expression, it becomes much more difficult to see how the parts of it relate to each other.
Perhaps someone will come up with an alternative syntax to regexes which is universally more readable, even in complex cases, but I submit that such a syntax would inherently require some equivalent to subroutine calls. We don't write 200-line blocks of application code with 15 layers of nested logic because it would be a monumental task just to track the logic of it, never mind figuring out what it actually does. If we're going to explode regexes into a more English-like form, then that same problem will occur and we'll need the same tools to manage it.
