Yeah, we've had a few problems with .htaccess like this. I'm still looking into why exactly.
I've tested FTP, FTPS, and SFTP and they all work for me. One difference that might be messing you up is SFTP is on port 1373 now. On the old Tommy it was port 1342. The reason we changed it was because the SFTP port was a constant cause of confusion for people because all three servers had a different port Tommy=1342, Ricky=1312, and Johnny=1373. So people would search on the forum and find the port of a server that they weren't on and it would obviously not work. To simplify things going forward with adding more and more servers we're just going to keep SFTP on port 1373 for all the servers.
Let us know if you find anything else that doesn't seem to be working right.