Ragel <a href="http://www.complang.org/ragel/">http://www.complang.org/ragel/</a> is a tool that integrates regular expressions and state machines under one umbrella.<br>It has backends currently for C, C++, Objective-C, D, Java and Ruby.  I do not think having an elisp backend would be a very big task.<br>
<br>After that (in my estimate) org-mode code would (could) become half as long and twice as fast -- at least those sections that are heavily regex oriented<br>