I suppose IMDB already has a pretty good architecture to handle that load, but please, if you're crawling from a single site, be careful. I host a similar database myself, and the CPU/load graphs of my server can tell me exactly when someone has a crawler active again. That's not fun if your goal is to keep a site responsive while keeping the hosting at low cost.
For me, it was more a proof of how efficient and fast a crawler can be. Also, a response from IMDB was very fast in less than 0.4 seconds, so not that much time was lost there.
Did you know that IMDB makes a subset of their data publicly available? http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/
IMO, using kue was a success because it also offers a web interface where you can check the progress and restart/check failed jobs.
Even though your implementation is a lot complex and very well documented, IMO using non blocking I/O it's a much better solution, because crawling is very intensive I/O and most of the time is spent with the connection (request + response time). Using that many machines and processes, the time should be much shorter with node.