I think your "academic bent" may be interfering with your activities. Your objective sounds a little
"academic".
"An extensive repository of rentals." My guess is that 99.9 % of readers would call these things videos. Perhaps it is just my not being close to the business, but a "rental" would seem to be a contract between parties regarding a service.
Video Ezy agrees to rent the video "XXX" to Customer123 for a period of z weeks for a price of $D (with conditions re non-return and or late return as a part of the rental agreement).
I think what you are missing is a clear description of the business in simple English terms.
Here are a couple of examples from tutorials on RogerAccessLibrary site that may help you describe the business opportunity/issue that is the subject of your database.
Case 1.
Code:
ZYX Laboratories requires an employee tracking database.
They want to track information about employees, the
employee's job history, and their certifications.
Employee information includes first name, middle initial,
last name, social security number, address, city, state, zip,
home phone, cell phone, email address. Job history would
include job title, job description, pay grade, pay range, salary,
and date of promotion. For certifications, they want
certification type and date achieved.
An employee can have multiple jobs over time,
(ie, Analyst, Sr. Analyst, QA Administrator).
Employees can also earn certifications necessary for their job.
Case 2.
Code:
Sue Johnson is starting a catering
business. She is looking for a program to help her maintain
her business. She wants to start by tracking customers and orders.
She will eventually want to add accounting features like accounts
payable, accounts receivable, and inventory control, but wants to start small.
Customers are the people to whom she sells her catering services.
Customer information includes:
Name, Address, Phone, Alternate Phone, Fax, and Email.
A customer may place many orders.
An Order is a group of items delivered as a single unit to a single Customer.
An Order contains the customer information, the order date,
delivery instructions and an itemized list of the Items delivered.
An order applies to only one customer at a time,
but each order can have many items on it.
Items are the individual items that appear on an order.
Each item has an associated item number, item description,
quantity, price and extended price.
Each item can appear on many orders, and can appear on one
or more orders.
Windows 8 
Access 2013
New to Access - Database Relationship Dilemma
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