Though I know what you mean, I also kind of saw it as a rite of passage. At some point in your career some guy selling merch under his jacket will come to you

Though I know what you mean, I also kind of saw it as a rite of passage. At some point in your career some guy selling merch under his jacket will come to you with a "great idea" where you will do all the work and he'll be the "idea guy". It does suck though that hackathons may have devolved into being just that. I haven't been to a hackathon since 2015 and if they've become either dominated by idea-guys or about only making nice looking frontends then that's kind of sad. EDIT: Oh, I guess I forgot a hackathon I went to in 2017, if you could even call it that. I arrived thinking that we'd be, you know, making actual apps. It turned out I may have been the only person in the entire venue doing actual work. Everyone on my team dicked around the whole time. We were one of 2 teams that actually had something that worked. All the other teams had fake as f*k "prototypes" in programs like Figma and no actually working code. The other team that had working code was just making a Twilio API call. The winner and all the others got attention because their apps looked good. My app might have been ugly but it successfully implemented nonstandard behavior (something you can't just rip off Stack Overflow) and even had authentication. Now I remember why I haven't been back to a hackathon since.