As I suspected, marking this as solved was jumping the gun a bit. This is most definitely not solved.
I am still unable to place ladders, even if I add another hatch along the way (as you show in your pics–thank you btw)
I am an experienced builder and while they have been ‘fiddly’ to place , I’ve never had any real issues with them until now.
(All that being said I was still surprised to learn you couldn’t have them any higher than 2 floors 
)
EDIT - You can place them higher than two floors. They just don’t currently work with the basic sandstone building set. weird.