I guess it depends on the type of hackathon and project. Not to long ago I participated in a hackathon in which we make a super simple video game. Even though t

I guess it depends on the type of hackathon and project. Not to long ago I participated in a hackathon in which we make a super simple video game. Even though the majority of the work was making the game, the 2 hours used in making the scrappiest ever node.js/express server for arcade-style high scores was the most popular feature by far. So, in that case, being a scrappy backend proved to be very valuable. Like 3 hours some people realized that they could just POST whatever to the server and the high scores where pointless, but nonetheless, that small backend (20 lines?) proved a very important point