I certainly appreciate that a lexer/parser generator can save me months of work. And as I mentioned in my original post, I'm using one. When I did my Google search for parser generators, I found several, and I chose the one that was public domain over BSD and GPL ones because the license makes it easy to use. I was unable to judge merit having not used any of them before, but ANTLR did not look markedly inferior to the alternatives. (Some lexer/parser generators, including ANTLR, require distributing a runtime with your application, not just the output code; thus the license is relevant. Bison/Flex was not an option as we are not using C).

I think you are overestimating my aversion to BSD code. Like I said, the situation where using BSD code would save me months of work has not yet come up (because there is more public domain code out there than you might think), and in that situation I would use it. Also, if our project had already incorporated some BSD code and therefore had precedent (approval from management/legal, a CREDITS file or equivalent to put the attribution in) I would be more comfortable.