Regular vs LALR(1): what is faster
I believe the reason for favoring regular expressions over LALR(1) grammars for accepting simple grammars stems from the time needed to build an LALR(1) automaton. Let $m$ denote the size of the grammar which is used to build the automata for accepting the language defined by said grammar. If you need to build up the accepting automaton during runtime you will probably want to use regular expressions because building up an LALR(1) automaton will take $O(m\cdot 2^m)$ which does not include the necessary testing if the input grammar even is LALR(1) ($O(m^3)$). Regular expressions instead can be build up quite easily, the check can occur during conversion (see [1] , re2post). 

Adding to the speed gained when building up different regular expressions during different program runs modern regular expressions, mostly PCRE, are NP-Complete, thus very powerful (see for instance [2]). Additionally, with most languages supporting regular expressions there also is an interactive environment to check if the regular expression really expresses your intention, which is more efficient from a programmer's perspective than to write the grammar, generate the parser and do a test and then reiterate the process. I believe this to be the main reason for using regular expressions over LALR(1) grammars. 

If you are interested in the implementation and runtime aspects of grammars [3] might also be of interest to you. 

[1] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

[2] http://nikic.github.com/2012/06/15/The-true-power-of-regular-expressions.html

[3] Gerhard Goos, William Waite, Compiler Construction, Springer, Jan 1984 ( symbolaris.com/course/Compilers/waitegoos.pdf)