The expo definitely has it's tradeoffs, but I've been to dozens of hackathons now, and before we switched to the expo, the endings were significantly lower energy: https://medium.com/how-to-throw-a-hackathon/635563ceab2f

Expo definitely favors larger teams as we only allow one person to demo from each team at a time, leaving the team members to swap out and check out all the other hacks. While the demos in front of everyone may be more fair, the expo builds community and gives people the opportunity to get immediate feedback on their pitch/product even if they dont win a prize or make it to the final round.

You should've seen the energy in the room.