If you are looking to get RSS format from the Twitter API calls check out http://tweet-2-rss.appspot.com
Full disclosure, I did create the service. I was encountering many of the same problems a lot of you were having but couldn’t find a solution that allowed me to make different types of API calls. A lot of services are out there allow you to get a user timeline or something like that but they end up getting a lot of users and the API limits slow everything down. Tweet2RSS uses your own OAuth credentials (meaning you will have to authenticate with your Twitter account) so you get the rate limits all to yourself. And you can use any of the v1.1 API calls that are there. Take a look, it’s probably not perfect but it’s working for me so far and I’m definitely open to feedback.