Profitable faucets? All faucets are profitable because you don't spend money for faucets. If you have time, claim faucets. However if you spend too much time with faucets, and don't have time to do other things which can help you to gain knowledge, get a job, receive salary, it's not good.
Even then, I had a similar feeling. Waste time entering a captcha and receiving incomprehensible amounts with several zeros in front. Yes, there were a lot of faucets, and people used a lot of software to automatically enter captchas. But I wonder how many of those inventors who tried so hard to get a freebie kept their bitcoins. For some reason, it seems to me that there are none at all. Since, logically speaking, people needed pennies, they were unlikely to leave them for many years.