Yeah, it's really brutal. I find the new recaptchas which I hit almost every time are much more exhausting than the old text-based ones, and probably much easier for a machine to solve to boot.
Surely, CAPTCHA wasn't replaced with something less dificult for machines to solve.
Have you seen research to indicate this?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6082
So humans have to clear higher and higher hurdles to prove themselves human while the computers use the answers from the captchas to get closer to humans' capabilities.
Perhaps my grammar wasn't correct there though.
In any case, check out the blackhat presentation about using Google's image recognition to solve the image based captchas. There are a wide variety of fairly advanced image recognition tools but a surprisingly small number of complex text recognition ones.