don't give up, things like this usually don't get the attention they deserve around here. you're in the pump and dump forum, should go to the miner's forum. I think this is one of the most interesting threads here right now - sadly I don't have the time to look into he code right now over the next few weeks. Hope I'll find some time later. Very, very interesting. Hope you get some more able programmers on board.
I agree. I don't think this will ever beat cgminer as far as hashing speed (especially if you're planning on using cpu only), and creating an "AI" that works better than brute force would be big news to the cryptography world, not just mining. I'm not going to say it's impossible but it's something many people smarter than I have been trying to do for years, and many of them would say it's impossible... at least with current technology in a reasonable amount of time.
This page on using SAT solvers for mining might interest you:
http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html. I don't know enough to tell you whether it's possible or feasible, but any idea to improve efficiency over brute forcing is interesting at the very least.
That said, your project is a great way for programmers that don't know C to see how hashing works (someone just asked about this on reddit and I pointed them here). And if you get more programmers involved and do come up with some creative way to improve efficiency, you can always convert that to C and/or OpenCL later.
Even though you may have your expectations set a little high, I appreciate the effort. My advice would be to lower expectations a little and think of it as a community/learning project (maybe move to project development section) and people might take you more seriously. Right now you're saying
"I'm going to use a VW Van to drag race against a Ferrari" and you should be saying
"Here's my VW Van and I'm looking for people who want to learn about engines and see if we can make it faster." On a somewhat related note, there's also a C# wrapper for Bitcoin-qt someone created and posted to reddit a while back:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1h1tfg/up_to_date_net_c_wrapper_for_bitcoinqt_video. I haven't looked at that code or your code yet but I plan to one of these days.