Your argument is utterly unconvincing. Noone would claim that parsing that HTML is a simple task.

Except that's not what I said, and people do try to use regexes to extract stuff from HTML all the time.

The real reason not to create a half-assed parser (using regex or otherwise) is the following: "But it worked yesterday." A hacked up solution is going to be far less resilient to change and a lot more expensive to maintain than one using a proper parser.

Which is exactly the argument I made in Parsing HTML/XML with Regular Expressions.

Update: PerlMonks has a preview function; I won't be responding to your ninja edits. The above quotes represent the entirety of your post at my time of posting.