Why not be the best of both? But in all seriousness I agree with your sentiment. I think we will end up significantly nerfing the faucet to only be a fun bonus for new users, entirely changing it to a once/twice a day daily reward or removing it entirely. I think any of these choices will result in a major backlash from the people who use the faucet, many of them think they are entitled to the rewards as they gained levels so they could use it and think that any nerf is robbery. The amount of support emails related to the faucet is staggering and has made it harder and harder to finish more important ones in a timely manner.
The key way to sort out this situation in my opinion is creating a system which rewards people with higher levels without being as expensive/gimmicky as the faucet. Ideally I want to make the faucet a minigame that can be played once or twice a day with scaling rewards based on level.
I have been a primedice and faucet fan for a long time. However, the faucet has turned into such an avenue of abuse and unnecessary source of grief for you that I don't see how it can be sustained. I recall all the grief you took following the first faucet adjustment and that was pretty ridiculous.
Maybe you should add an advertising banner to PD like Just Dice had for awhile to offset some of the expense. I realize you get some income from solvemedia, but it can't be significant and if they think the bad guys are botting it I imagine they'll cut that off.
I think a once a day bonus would be fun, but don't see a way to structure it in a world where the bad guys can freely open accounts, transfer btc between them (via PvP if not directly) without some human intervention, e.g. a whitelist. The users at JD finally put together a list of "trusted users" that they used in conjunction with a rain bot because of excessive spoofing and alt accounts logging in whenever a rain was in progress.
Good Luck!