Attached is a draft/proof-concept patch.diff of my ideas regarding how to make dired/wdired play nicely with an arbitrary list of files and folders, including a recursive list.  I asked for some help on emacs.stackexchange.com to implement these new approaches, and used the answers by @Drew, @Tobias and @Andreas Röhler.  Citations to their answers are included in the draft/proof-concept patch.  I would need some help regarding how to update the dired-directory variable when deleting a file in a regular dired-mode buffer, and I have added a FIXME notation in the likely spot of `dired.el` -- the approach would be similar to renaming a file (already implemented in the attached draft patch), but is a bit more complicated due to potential recursive deletions.

The file-name-nondirectory components in wdired-mode now have read-only attributes so that a user no longer erroneously believes that he/she can modify them, and only latter see an error message when trying to commit the changes:  file-error Renaming No such file or directory ....

I have only done some basic renaming of files and directories in wdired mode using both `find-name-dired` and `dired-list-files-folders' to populate the dired- buffer.  I did not spend any time implementing hash-tables to speed up the modification of the dired-directory variable, as that would likely involve modifying a few or more aspects of dired-mode.

Thanks,

Keith