Is there a more user-friendly way to download multiple articles from arXiv?
You can use JabRef for this. More precisely, there are plugins by Christoph Lehner that do the job:


arxiv-rss to browse the list of new preprints and import the ones you want;
localcopy for downloading the PDF and automatically renaming it (according to a pattern you can define).


This isn't 100% automated (you still need to manually click "download arXiv PDF" once you've imported the entry in your bib file), but this is still much better than doing it all by hand.