What I really wished for when I read the title was for something that could make me write regexes but verbosely.
There are tools like Regexper[1] that let you visualize the regex as an automata graph, and there are tools like text2re[2] which will allow you to put in text and visually generate a regex to match it.
I feel like better regex tools should exist on the command line, and it's potentially a great place for such tools to be rapidly developed and adopted. There are GUI tools for this like poirot[3], but the command line still exists because of its accessibility, uniformity, and extensibility.
links:
[2] http://txt2re.com/index.php3?s=24%3AFeb%3A2014+%22This+is+an...