yeah, those are a big pain... It just takes alotta force and a bit of bravery. If you still cant, why not make the holes a little bit bigger with a dremel or other tool?
EDIT: today i had a problem gettin mine back in too. i found out that if you have 2 pairs of pliers, you can manually twist the hinge. Moving it back and forth might make it line up better. Dont worry about twisting it off or overtwisting it, as far as i can tell, you can spin it an infinite amount of times in any direction.