I have always been thinking that apache rules are useless! but recently I came across a situation that left me with no choice other than using apache redirect rules. There was a web based project with spring MVC and due to some reasons I was unable to do the redirect using web.xml url patterns and spring's SimpleUrlHandlerMapping mappings.
After 7-8 hours of wrestling with apache rules eventually i found out the way! Actually my rule was written correctly but due to misuse of flags as in ( RewriteRule source dest [flags] ), it was not working properly.