Prune - Find's tricky switch

After many thousands of uses, I finally got around to investigating find's exclusion parameters.  Showing its age, it basically consists of an arcane string of -path options combined with an -o for "or" followed by a -prune to indicate the need to exclude it from the search.

I was always sure there was some way to do it.  (With a regex, if nothing else.)  I've read the man page about 100 times and I've never understood how it worked till last week.  It works like a charm, in fact.

That being said, surely something closer to the du --exclude parameter is in order.  Features aren't very useful if people don't know they're there.