I’ve opened an issue on the Buttons plugin github to add YAML increment/decrement as a button action. It’s likely that automatic triggering of these button actions is outside the scope of that plugin, but if the YAML integration is implemented, it would at least give the option to click a button when you load a note to add to the counter.
There are sooo many features that could benefit from/would depend on robust CRUD control of frontmatter. I wonder if a single frontmatter-CRUD plugin would be helpful as a sort of frontmatter API that other plugins could take advantage of. I suppose ideally this would be implemented in the official Obsidian plugin API.
Just thinking out loud 
As for rating, I saw somewhere (can’t find it now) the idea of using tags to rate a note, e.g.: #★, #★★, #★★★. And I see your discussion here about ratings. What are you looking for in a YAML rating variable setup?