Add Macro To Visual Editor?

We run a magazine-style blog and many of our posts include reviews that involve a single overall star rating (0-5 with half stars as an option). We tried plugins for this but they created other issues and have decided the cleanest solution is to just keep the stars graphically in our library and add them as images.

However, this is problematic for two reasons. Once the images scroll off the Media first screen it’s a hassle to keep bring up the ones we want. Second, for formatting they need to be followed by a non-breaking space so the typical code is as follows:

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-4781" alt="2-star" src="http://slashcomment.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/2-star.png" width="75" height="15" /></p>
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How can we go about making this easier to deal with? The one approach I thought of was to add macro icons for each star to the editor but we mainly use the visual editor and I’ve not done any “shortcodes”.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.