Just wondering, as dired seems tedious.
For dealing with lots of directories, I use find-dired instead of just plain dired. I filter the types of files I'm interested in with -name and -prune out build directories until I've got a single dired buffer with my whole project. Pressing g in a find-dired buffer will refresh the buffer with the same find command, so once you've got the find parameters right it's quite convenient.