I see your point of view and respect it. I think hackathons may not be everyone and my original thought was I felt companies using hackathons as a way to benchmark developers (as if we are machines) based on their output.

I could be wrong but that's just how I feel about it.

Lastly, if I were to organize a hackathon. I think the the first I would do would be making it at least a week long instead of 2-3 days. In addition, I would make it required to not allow participants to stay more than 8 hours each day. After all when I think of hackathons, I think it's a time to tinker with technology and come up with something cool. NOT staying up for 3 days straight to win some prize.