>time and effort might be key here for your mastery of this subject.

It doesn't have to be this way. If most programming languages were designed like regular expressions they would be unusable. I can spend a year w/o writing a single line of Pascal or C++ and then it would come back immediately. I occasionally found regular expressions useful in my work, but only a couple of times could justify spending time on learning a little bit of it only to forget the next day. In a few other cases I simply googled a solution and used w/o understanding it. Most often I just write code instead, it is verbose but at least it's clear what it does.