Moving from custom CMS to Drupal and need to keep a myriad of old mod_rewrites
Moving effort to this question and answer Drupal 7 rewrite not using .htaccess. THis is what I'm trying to do anyhow is eliminate the .htaccess.
However, I discovered a module called htaccess

Htaccess is a module which autogenerates a Drupal root htaccess file based on your settings.
Drupal tries to provide a one size fits all htaccess for Apache webservers, but this goal is increasingly difficult. This module allows the webmaster to set specific options.

Added benefits is that for every drupal core update (in which drupal overwrites htaccess), I just re-deploy my set of rules which this module appends to the active .htaccess file. Additionally, my customization to htaccess are in the database and safe in scheduled backups in from Backup Migrate.