I would file this under "feature request"; the current situation isn't so much buggy, as slow.  While you can produce a segfault with the current regular expression engine (due to stack overflow), you can do the same thing with regular Python on Linux (with sys.setrecursionlimit), ctypes, etc., and none of those are considered as buggy.

My only concern with such a change is that it may or may not change the semantics of the repeat operators '*' and '+', which are currently defined as "greedy".  If I skimmed the article correctly late at night, switching to a Thompson family regular expression engine may result in those operators no longer being greedy.  Please correct me if I am wrong.