Here is my (slowly implemented) plan:

0. Recommend regex as advanced replacement of re (issue22594).

1. Fix all obvious bugs in the re module if this doesn't break backward compatibility (issue12728, issue14260, and many already closed issues).

2. Deprecate and then forbid behavior which looks as a bug, doesn't match regex in V1 mode and can't be fixed without breaking backward compatibility (issue22407, issue22493, issue22818).

3. Unify minor details with regex (issue22364, issue22578).

4. Fork regex and drop all advanced nonstandard features (such as fuzzy matching). Too many features make learning and using the module more hard. They should be in advanced module (regex).

5. Write benchmarks which cover all corner cases and compare re with regex case by case. Optimize slower module. Currently re is faster regex for all simple examples which I tried (may be as result of issue18685), but in total results of benchmarks (msg109447) re is slower.

6. May be implement some standard features which were rejected in favor of this issue (issue433028, issue433030). re should conform at least Level 1 of UTS #18 (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/#Basic_Unicode_Support).

In best case in 3.7 or 3.8 we could replace re with simplified regex. Or at this time re will be free from bugs and warts.