The only people who would have solved the captcha faucet to get coins at virtually next to nothing value at that time would be the ones who believed in the project right from the start which to me is a fair distribution scheme. ICO based distribution is usually more greed driven. In this case the developers and team were more motivated in building a new innovative blockchain protocol as opposed to raising money by simply issuing ERC20 tokens. Speaks a lot about the project in itself. And the team has even succeeded in building a beautiful, disruptive scalable protocol and currency with no transaction fee. I've tried RaiBlocks and so far have been impressed.
Which in itself is a mechanism that just spreads the incentive to hype and post to all social media channels trying to pump a coin amongst a larger pool of individuals, many of whom are desperate enough to get rich that they are willing to sit and click through captchas for pennies.
Or in other words, just gets you a larger initial pool of astroturfers online.