For the PoW, 1 proof is generated on the send and 1 proof is generated on the receive, this is why people will see CPU activity when receiving from the faucet, the faucet itself also generating its own work. Other than that there is no PoW in the network, only when transactions are being added and the work is only applied to those doing the transactions.
Taking the example of RFCs and how they're maintained, how do you see their incentive structure being similar or different than something like this? From my perspective, groups maintain the TCP standard without TCP giving direct in-protocol incentives for its use, people build on top of it which is where their incentives lie.
I thought 'representative nodes' were ones that were doing this send and receive PoW for other users? Your comment made me think that this was already happening.
I understand that you don't want financial rewards within the protocol for running nodes and I'm not trying to get you to go against that. I was thinking of encouraging people through facilitating it or through promoting the idea of it rather than actual bribery. I'm not sure I would want to set one up right now, but I would be curious what's involved in having a representative node rather than regular wallet (unless I've miss-remembered what they actually are) and perhaps at some point before too long there may be other people curious enough to want to give it a try.