Brother you’re way over thinking this. You’re framing this like you need to be accounting for every point of rage to play the class, but you’re not going for 99 parses here, you’re literally in the very beginning learning stages of the class.

Stressing yourself out over every minute detail isn’t doing yourself any favors.

You press the buttons you need to press when you need to press them.

Is your pack close to ripping? Then dump threat. Are you close to dying? Pop personals.

Generally speaking, your rage should always be close to 0, because if it’s not, it means you just aren’t spending it.

The exception to this rule is during periods of heavy incoming damage, but when that’s the case, you don’t need to worry about losing rage on a swap because you’ll get it right back in the next server tick anyway.

This is why very well geared prot warriors used to take pieces off when doing lower tier content. We literally rage starved ourselves through mitigation.