But one of the primary traits of hackers is that they tend to be generalists.
I'm very, very much a generalist. My other hobbies that straddle the line between hobby and professional interest (in that I do them for play but have gotten money for them) include fiction writing, marketing psychology, humanities and qualitative research, and bra fitting.
Currently I'm off on a spree about the physiological nature of emotions and I'm getting really into experiences that are primarily physical and learning about biology in my spare time, which means I don't spend it coding or tinkering.
I can still code/tinker/approach tech problems with a hacker mindset, but I don't like to pretend I'm as good as people who really love it. I'm a dilettante to my core.
I honestly think that one of the things that has diminished the hacker community to a degree is that it has become synonymous in most people's minds with computers. But really, computer hackers are just one subset of the larger hacker community. There are legit hackers who have no interaction with computers beyond what most people do.
By your definition, I would definitely count (as would, say, my cousin who is buying laptops for her kids to take apart and homeschooling them and taking a hacker's approach to parenting or the one who got really into theology for about ten years or my uncle who was obsessed with cameras or...), but I think the prevailing view sees hackerdom as tech (or at the very least mechanical) related and I also believe that hewing closely to a community's default understanding of a term is useful for communication, so I still wouldn't claim the title on HN. In an anthropological/historical/sociological exploration of hackerdom, I probably would. :)
As a hacker, I have a stubbornness and a strong sense of the justice of technical correctness, so I can't help but try keep the larger sense of the word alive. Even if only as part of a background chorus of hackers saying "well, actually..."
But I do try to remember that we're the weirdos here.
