As Kaiser suggested, the Metabox script available over at http://www.deluxeblogtips.com/2011/03/meta-box-script-update-v30.html propagates metadata to the database as individual entries instead of a serialized array. I suppose it is ultimately a matter of preference between how you want your data to be stored in the database. I have appreciated using Dimas’WP Alchemy plugin up until now, but now that I need to be able to query the database according the meta value, I needed to be able to access specific values directly. Rilwis’solution adds the meta data to the database as individual entries (non-serialized) which is what I needed.
Thanks Kaiser.