I've been writing an entirely automated anime sorting and processing system that runs off of a "on torrent completed handler" and sorts it into a folder. It uses the hash lookup feature to get information about the file. That's about half of my AniDB usage.

The other half is discovering who has subbed what group. By maintaining a list of all the files a particular subber has released it's easy to lookup and easily determine who to get a release from without having to look everywhere.

Unfortunately, as awful as the API and interface is. It's the only one of its kind.