All I can say is that there is some serious bullshit on this thread!
Pay peanuts, get monkeys? Rubbish. You can find some good writers on there, it just takes time.
Ratings are useless? Of course ratings aren't bloody useless! They're not everything, but they're certainly not useless!
I have one very good writer who rewrites 750 words for me for $5. It's a quick turn around and I generally use it for Adsense articles. I've another who writes 1000 words for me for $5. From the States and is great at writing. These are both custom orders, as I initially ordered their Gigs and then kept in touch with them and ordered more. I need a lot of writing done, so I spread it out across several writers.
I've recently found 3 more decent writers. I of course proof read them and make the odd tweak, but they're unique and make perfect sense.
Be warned though: I've had 2 recently, who change the Ascii format so that it's unreadable to machines, such as Copyscape and Google - even though it's an exact copy of someone else's work. When someone sends you the finished article, copy and paste it into a new Word document. If they've simply changed the coding, Word will underline loads of words in red, as it doesn't understand what that word is.