The problem is that most faucets will not let you withdraw until you reach 0.001, which can take over a week of viewing ads, clicking around and wasting lots of time in general.
Faucets are the equivalent of those work-from-home jobs ads you see promising earnings of $1000 every week, in reality you end up spending hours licking stamps for a few dollars a days.
Which is what OP is trying to bring up all along that somehow faucets can actually be bad in terms of damaging bitcoin's reputation. Maybe i what i think is that probably in few years down the road when Bitcoin adoption has really gone mainstream, we need to consider all this again. For now, i think it still has a role basically as a platform for newbies to try out the system.