Thanks Kirk...
In case anyone follows this thread in the future, the closest I could get was to work the Star Rating value into SuppCat1 field like I want. I am limited to just 5 incremental values (which works for this one project now).
Basically, I organize the sequence of the images the way I want, then I set 1 star for the first image in the sequence, 2 stars for the second image..etc... until I get to 5.
Then I put just the number of the star rating value ({rating:0,1}) into SuppCat1.
Now I can access when I do renaming by referencing the SuppCat1 field.
Not elegant, but sorta gets the job done for now.
-M