Thanks, Kenward. I am going to download Directory Opus right now and try it out on some of the stuff underlying my desire for regex in X1.
Granting your point that adding regex may take X1 in the wrong direction, given company's goals for it, I would still add that the "begins with" operator that I described above would add a heck of a lot of value. Moreover, I do not think it would stand out among the other X1 operators/connectives (rather would fit in nicely), and would be just as simple to use as the others or simpler (I imagine many X1 users have not worked much with Boolean operators and get confused about how they combine. Though I think the documentation on these is pretty much a paradigm of explanation on how to use them, and how they combine, to the naive).
Granting your point that adding regex may take X1 in the wrong direction, given company's goals for it, I would still add that the "begins with" operator that I described above would add a heck of a lot of value. Moreover, I do not think it would stand out among the other X1 operators/connectives (rather would fit in nicely), and would be just as simple to use as the others or simpler (I imagine many X1 users have not worked much with Boolean operators and get confused about how they combine. Though I think the documentation on these is pretty much a paradigm of explanation on how to use them, and how they combine, to the naive).