I have cobbled together an addon that allows you to put all shapekeys on a mesh to be transferred over to an armature bone. This allows for driving the shapekeys from the armature.
In essence, you select the mesh with the shapekeys on it, select the bone in pose mode you want to drive the keys from and the script will set up all the drivers for you.
This is an awesome timesaver for facial rigs.
You can download it from here, installation and usage instructions are in the readme file.
I do have one problem with this: the drivers that are created do not auto-update on creation. So you need to save and reload the file to make them work. I have spent 3 days taking the thing apart and putting it back together to fix this, but I am not even sure why this occurs.
If any experienced coder has any insight, I would very much appreciate it.