I am very much in the market for a way to do regex without resorting to incantations that look like someone spilled a bag of special characters. Just not on JS...

You seem to be the author. A suggestion to you. You should really rethink your playground. All it currently does is turning melody into regex, which is important to have for comparison. But you're specifically courting people who DON'T want to deal with regex syntax. What you desperately need is a way to run melody expressions. And - if possible - a way to translate regex into melody wouldn't hurt as well.

Many (most?) of us tend to google regex on the web and pasting them in our code. Having them converted into a syntax that we can better understand would be hugely helpful.