Chris Conley, a member of this community and a well known Philly developer, has been building a powerful API for developers to use to interact with Mechanical Turk (it started with his own frustrations using theirs). You can check it out here: http://houdinihq.com/.

If you're looking for a solution to some of the problems addressed in this article, his API (and the corresponding Rails gem) are a good place to start.