Batch rename folders

I'm helping to organize a Lightroom catalog for someone else, and

I'm wanting to confirm these two obersvations: 

1. There is no way to batch rename a series of folder names in Lightroom. (I know you can batch rename images.)
2. Using periods in the folder names seems to foil Lightroom's ability to filter by folder. 

For example, this library has the folders all named by YY.MM.DD

My observation is that searching by YY.MM.DD doesn't filter the folder list. 

However, when I renamed one folder to YY-MM-DD it was able to filter the list just to that folder. 

Hoping there is a way to avoid manually re-naming all folders in Lightroom.

I could also use the Finder > Rename function to replace . with - in Finder, but that would require manually re-linking each folder, which is also tedious.

Hopefully there's a trick I'm missing!