Magento 1.5 - Custom Options as Shopping Cart Price Rules - No Can Do!

After spending more than 8 hours attempting to get Custom Options to work as criteria for shopping cart price rules, I have given up for now. The closest that one could get to identify an "option" in the cart and apply price rules would be to create a product from an attribute set, which is obviously not a "customer selectable option," and use the attribute set as criteria for the price rule.

I wish I had better news about this, as I really need this functionality. Maybe I should create a module. :|