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.
Regular expressions are not hard to understand (once you understood finite state machines), but the syntax is hard to read in many cases.