Your perseverance Jake, almost matches mine - I’m impressed 
Lesser mortals have probably walked off the scene by now
It would be good to get this solved and put to bed.
Dez (and Jake),
OMG! The two of you got me dizzy!
Dez, Jake is correct - you DON’T want to use mod_rewrite to remove file extensions! What would Apache serve, your php scripts as text files? It’s YOUR job as webmaster to create the links in the format you want them to be seen THEN to generate mod_rewrite code to take your “new format” and convert it into something that Apache can use to serve the correct (parsed) script.
HOWEVER, I’d had someone ask for that (to make site-wide URI updates) and, after an initial “no way,” I came up with something which would remove her file extensions for the browsers then serve the file WITH the extension (hidden). I’ll MAKE you actually look at my tutorial for the code I gave her to get that done rather than spoonfeeding here.
Regards,
DK