I may be in the minority, but I love Automator. I use it all the time, whenever I might have written a script in Python or bash or banged out a C# app (in Windows) to do something.

One of the things that's missing in the default Finder actions is a rename action that can do more complex, pattern-based replacements. So, I fired up Xcode and tried my hand at banging out a new Action and turned out to be fairly easy.

Ideally, I wanted to use regular expression search and replace patterns, but I couldn't quite figure out how to adjust the dynamic load path for the embedded framework (RegexKit in this case). So, I punted and went with a very simply, wildcard based action.

Give it a try, you might like it.