Yep that was it. Is it possible that the dialog wasn't displaying everything? It just seems that in every other instance where a rule is created by entering the database value, there's the compare to and the operator and the text field. All this showed is a plain text field.
Anyway, I stand by my original post - it's still a great tool. One last question - I went back to text values, it just seems overall more simple. Is there a case to be made by using numeric values, possibly when the site requires a more complex rule structure, where the math operators would be better?