I tend to agree. If you're using an imperative language then the basic primitives of structured programming (loops, conditionals and functions) are all you need to write a recursive descent parser. Combinators like Parsec's 'sepBy' can make your parser more concise, but at the cost of making it more difficult to reason about performance and more difficult to read for anyone who hasn't memorized all the combinators.

Most parser combinator libraries give you lots of help with the easy stuff (e.g. parse a list of integers separate by commas), but not so much help with the hard stuff like generating good error messages or avoiding unbounded backtracking.