There are some JSON support by using redis hashes but I never used it and I doubt it's any useful in this case.
Resque probably uses JSON instead of YAML because it's more broad. I also found a comment on this issue about that.
@defunkt
YAML does not preserve Ruby objects better - with complicated objects it can serialize an object that it can't unserialize later. This is unacceptable.
If you want symbol keys I believe YAJL has an option we could use to preserve the keys. Also you could trivially call symbolize_keys on an object if you have ActiveSupport.