I think you made a worthy programming exercise, and ESPECIALLY like your --help text, and pooh! on the AnonyMonk who dissed you. So what if TMTOWTDI??? I will add one suggestion to blazar's, which is:

perl -e 'rename "./" . "\nbraindead\tname", "sensible_name"'
[download]

which helps catch those pesky '-' at the beginning. :D