Looking at the Sublime Text 3 documentation [1], I see very little functional difference to Pygments. In fact, they seem remarkably similar. Pygments models a state machine via regex matching and actions, including pushing/popping state, sub-lexers, and so on.

What is the "richer highlighting and semantic information" to which you refer?

[1] https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/syntax.html