Topaz and Regular Expressions

I just listened to the topaz talk ( http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/09/topaz.html),
and found it and accurate in two respects: 1) that a good rewrite
would lower the barriers to entry for coders (like me) quite a bit, and 2) 
that the 'hard issues' are going to be what causes its success or failure.

So I'm surprised that regular expressions weren't mentioned - exactly how 
entwined is the current implementation around perl5, and how easy will it be 
to engineer their inclusion in topaz? 

Ed