Nice one, Eugene. I agree that a manual find-and-replace is much safer, and your exception list looks good. It would look less scary if you make it case-insensitive with the (?i) switch, so you can use
(?i)(?<!\bmai)(?<!\bpri) . . .
Another thing is that I now remember that ize words should be changed only if you have a consonant+vowel before the z, so my original would be
[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz][aeiou]\Kz(?=(e[ds]?|ations?)\b)
which ignores snooze, maize, etc. (You could probably remove some of the consonants in that list, x for instance.)
Probably some more generalizations are possible. Maybe it's the case that words like raze, razed should be ignored, i.e. you need three or more letters before the z.
And of course there are words that should be changed in some cases, e.g. the noun prize should be changed, but the verb should not.
As to applying a character style to make things visible, that's a nice idea, but I suggest using my GREP editor. It highlights all matches in a text (and can make a long GREP expression more readable). When you're satisfied that everything the expression catches can be changed, you simply change everything. When you see anything amiss, add it to the exceptions.
The GREP editor is here:
https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/grep_editor.html
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