rule sets not appearing

I would be interested in helping any way I can, since I really want this to work. I have time but I am new to Drupal and rusty with PHP and SQL. I learned to code before OOP and understand the basic premises but don't really think that way. On the other hand, I've always been good at troubleshooting and debugging and have experience writing software manuals, both technical and end user. My daughter can also help with coding (she is helping me set up the website) but again she is new to Drupal. What is the best way we can help?

Here is what I want to do - seems simple but so far I'm baffled:

I have Author and Editor roles. I have a CCK workflow field that is "with Author", "with Editor", "Live", or "Archived". An Author should see a list of revisions they have created but not yet submitted to the Editor. The Author should be able to submit the content to the Editor. The Editor should see a list of revisions that are "with Editor" and publish them or send them back to the Author for more work. Ideally the Editor could also start a new revision of a Live node and assign it to an Author, but I can work around that.

My first attempt was to set this up with a node view and VBO with rulesets. Worked pretty well, but could not get a list of what I wanted. If a node was "Live" a new revision that was in process would not show up in the proper place. So I did the same view as a node revision view and I can get the exact display I want but now no actions.

It seems from watching behavior that each revision has its own value for the CCK workflow field and those values are correct. (Just verified this by looking at the database.) So I would like VBO to allow selection of a revision then delete, revert, edit links and a button for "Submit to Editor", "Send Back to Author", "Publish", "Start New Revision". For most of the buttons (rulesets) I mostly need to set the value of the CCK field. I can probably use triggered rules to do the rest, although I won't know for sure until I try it. The CCK field is retrievable by vid and vid is unique to each revision.

I just spent some time looking through the code relevant to revisions in the core node module. Being new to Drupal I have been confused about what part does what. I thought I needed the Revisioning module to manage revisions, but revisions are part of the core node module. At this point I may try removing Revisioning and Module Grants modules to see if I can determine if I really need them. I know that Module Grants changes the permissions for revisions to AND instead of OR, but other than that I am not clear on what those modules are doing.

In the case where a node is published but needs revision without removing the published version, the revision being edited is not the one that is current for the node. If you change the current revision for the node to the one in process, then the published version isn't accessible to anonymous users. The Revisioning module does most of what I want, but the way it shows the pending revisions is awkward and confusing to use (at least to me). I did install and configure the Workflow module but it gave me another awkward way of accessing the revisions. I got several more books on Drupal and I now understand it much better than I did. I'm beginning to see there may be other ways to do what I want. I'm going to keep studying and experimenting and I'll probably have a much better idea of how to implement this in a couple of weeks.