Similar to Marius' answer, the way I see for metaethics to not have exactly the same problems as ethics is to have some statement similar to the ultimate criterion for science, "things that produce measurably accurate results are to be used rather than things that don't." But in the same way that this raises the question "why is working selected over not-working?", any analogous claim in metaethics raises the question "why are moral systems that have property X preferable?", and aside from consistency, which is not a strong enough property, I don't know of any property X that is as universal to humans as "working is better than not working." But I'm not certain, so I'm not ready to doom metaethics to failure yet.
lukeprog gave a list of metaethics questions here:
Most of these questions make no sense to me. I imagine that the moral intuitions in my brain come from a special black box within it, a "morality core" whose outputs I cannot easily change. (Explaining how my "morality core" ended up a certain way is a task for evo psych, not philosophy.) Or I can be more enlightened and adopt Nesov's idea that the "morality core" doesn't exist as a unified device, only as an umbrella name for all the diverse "reasons for action" that my brain can fire. Either perspective can be implemented as a computer program pretty easily, so I don't feel there's any philosophical mystery left over. All we have is factual questions about how people's "morality cores" vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?