Thanks everyone for your help. I chose to go the save template/save to a single directory route. I got it almost working, except save books to disk {authors}-{title} was giving me title sort rather than title (sometimes). But I read in another post I can fix this by changing something in tweaks-control formatting of title and series when used in template to 'strictly alphabetic' to change this, and now everything works! YAY!!!
Honestly didn't think I would be able to do it. :P