Well, a good product person can inform the design of your hack and likely improve it. But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.

Recently I have seen a trend of "useless hackathons" where the goal is to produce the coolest and least useful hacks you can think of (like a remote controlled toilet). I think the idea is to free people to just build stuff and not worry about it being useful. These ones tend to be community-organized though, for many of the reasons the original article author mentioned.