yeah this is better as a feature request.  certianly low priority either way.

-nothing- I propose doing would change the syntax or behaviour of existing regular expressions at all.  Doing so would be a disaster.  thompson nfa does not imply changing the behaviour.

anyways its a lot more than a simple "patch" to change the re module to not use backtracking so i expect this to languish unless someone has a of free time and motivation all at once. :)