I agree with you, most of the time you lose only your time to participate in airdrops, unfortunately.

After doing your own research, finding good ICO projects can be much more profitable and you can usually join the bounty program.

There are many good crypto related projects that are developing now.

If I can give you guys my opinion, I discovered an exciting one: RAWG.

Just now the RAWG team won TWO blockchain contests in one day. Amazing! Have a look at this article explaining this great result:
https://medium.com/rawg/wizardry-product-transparency-5325fd85557a

Like they say: “This is RAWG’s promise to become one of the trustworthy projects in the sea of fraud and scam”.

If you want to have a look and get some information, the ICO will start in a short period and they are at the moment in pre-ICO phase.

The ICO site is this one: https://token.rawg.io/.
It's a video game discovery platform that converts your skills into goods and services.

You can earn tokens by playing your favorite games. The site is already working, with more than 50,000 games in the database and new games are getting added every day.

They have just started a very rich bounty program for everyone who is willing to participate:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4147507

Have a look. I hope this information is helpful!