Ugh, never mind.
Two things were happening....
The most important of the two was that I didn't realize that if you haven't expressly set the accountname query field for a userprofile query connection... it appears to default to whomever is logged in and processes that info...instead of erroring out and telling you that field hasn't been set for the query.
My rules were setting a field that was then to be plugged into the accountname query field. The rules weren't working, but the process proceeded with the current logged in user so I got a false-positive that the rules worked.
I put in various flags to monitor what was going on and caught this.