Mod_rewrite makes me feel dumb

The combination of regular expressions and voodoo just makes me want to HULK SMASH my desk into little itty bitty pieces. I am reading this example, and right away I had a question, which the author doesn't explain in well enough detail to make me understand. http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/a-deeper-look-at-mod_rewrite-for-apache/ Why in the heck do the "/user/joe/x" and "profile/joe/x" don't match?I wish there was a way I could run a debug on this component, and watch the pattern matching tree for myself. Because that Nettuts tutorial has comments closed, and I am just steaming at the ears at how much inane filler there is. I always get obsessive when it comes to knowing some little detail.