I'm not an Emacs user so what I'm about to say may be based on totally incorrect information.
Seems to be that Wdired is just a hack that represents file and directory metadata in a textual format (in a buffer in Emacs parlance). It's not obvious to anyone that editing a filename in this buffer actually goes to the file system and changes the name of the file. It's even less obvious that removing rows removes files or directories. It actually sounds rather dangerous to use.
This is not functionality that emerges from some elegant design of Emacs, it seems it's just a hack.
This is why Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is so powerful in .NET. You never need to learn any ORM specific query language or syntax since you've probably learned to use LINQ with objects already and then you just continue to use it with a database.
Seems to me it's bad practice to combine the text you want to show with the formatting (escape codes) in string literals. Everything is then immediately dependent on specific type of UI technology (terminal).