It is not a secret that I am a big fan of Dired. Recently I learned about a thing introduced relatively recently into Emacs, that is, the wdired-create-parent-directories variable. If you set it to a non-nil value, renaming a file or directory in Wdired to something containing one or more slashes will Do The Right Thing. How cool is that?
Also, I have set wdired-allow-to-change-permissions to t, and now I can change file permissions in Wdired with keyboard macros, for instance. (It’s probably not much more powerful than good ol’ chmod, but it’s Emacs!) Consult the manual for the details.