Verified that front-end workflow for renaming attribute columns as working against geoserver. Great success!!
Found out that retyping current column names to new column names can (will) wipe the data from those columns. Am now re-populating the columns as I retype them.

This will probably not provide super happy fun times on larger shapefiles
Display of shorelines on update complete
Shoreline removal tested as fully working
Sample shorelines do not get checked for proper columns as we expect them to be stored on GeoServer with the proper columns and even if they don't have the proper columns, we do not want to allow manual changing of those columns