I don't consider that a failing of regular expressions (which predate perl), but a failure of implementation. I've thought that instead of syntax it should be an API option that says "this is a matcher" vs. "this is a capture". Then the same regex works for both, it's just how you run it.

So would it not be possible to mix capturing and non-capturing groups in the same regex? That's useful to do if you have code that expects specific things to be captured at specific group indices, and you need to add grouping somewhere else in the regex without messing it up.