Custom rewrites in 2.3

My site uses a number of custom mod_rewrite rules in the form:

RewriteRule ^(news|onair|events)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA,L]

These were borrowed from WordPress’s verbose rewrite rules. When the 2.1 upgrade cleaned up people’s .htaccess files, it broke my custom htaccess rewrites and intercepted every URI request, returning 404s for legitimate rewrites.

The workaround I found involved writing a function in my theme’s functions.php file which created an array of additional rules, and adding the following line to call that function:

apply_filters('rewrite_rules_array', 'add_custom_rewrites');

Needless to say, the 2.3 upgrade with its new taxonomy system breaks even this code, so I’m looking for a new workaround. Suggestions are most welcome!