Yes, I do mean worse in absolute terms. What happened was, there were two separate highlighting mechanisms in Jed. One was a sort of ad-hoc thing hard-coded in the editor's C core, which was basically just about usable for highlighting C and could also be extended to other basically programming-language-shaped syntaxes by configuring it at the general level of "this is the comment character, this is the list of operators, these are delimiters etc". The other was based on regular expressions and was much more flexible and general, and in particular one could configure it entirely in the customisation language to be suitable for things that had nothing at all to do with programming languages. I had hoped that highlighting schemes based on the former would gradually migrate to the latter and then the former would be thrown away, but it appears that in fact the latter has fallen into disuse and more and more language modes are reverting to the (now somewhat souped up but still not really as flexible as it should be) former. I think part of the reason for this is that the maintainers didn't really understand the regexp-based scheme, so when it came to adding new features they tended to graft them on to the one they knew how to modify.