I had something similar happen. I didn't have to do it nearly as many times as you, but it was definitely 6 - 7 times for each one. I agree it was damned annoying. I even looked for a link where I could complain to someone about all this time and aggravation, but since I've also heard people complaining about unanswered emails, in the end, I didn't bother.
Three times of solving those stupid pictures is often enough -- because some of them are so simple you can't screw them up. To have to answer half a dozen when you couldn't possibly have gotten all five previous ones wrong really did start to annoy me.
I even asked my husband ... "Do you think there's any possibility that after a certain level they start trying to discourage you from going to these sites? Don't the people running them depend on visitors doing this to benefit their interests? Why would they go to such trouble just to piss people off?"
Maybe it was just a temporary glitch. Like you, I certainly hope so ... because having to do a captcha more than twice (because I hate them in the first place -- they are so damn boring!!) and I start to ask myself, is this really worth it?
I also wondered if collecting more often than usual might have triggered some kind of "stalling device" ... so that throwing half a dozen captchas at you was meant to deliberately slow you down -- or make you mad enough to go away a while so the faucet's "drip rate" would also slow down, too.
Like you, I don't have any answers. Like you, I also didn't sign up to devote my life to solving captchas.