In case anyone is interested and in response to my own ?, I ran across a couple of scripts at the link below that seem to allow you to "merge" everything together. They also pointed out that autoyast contains a script that rebuilds the "descr/package*" files.
http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/~stoltze/Projekte/Autoinstallation/ The 8.0 link contains a couple of extras for those ppl that don't have autoyast. Leland
