Just had the most frustrating Hackathon experience

I just finished a hackathon, and honestly, I’m feeling beyond frustrated right now.

My team and I worked super hard on a speech detection tool for dementia/stroke ish. We actually had a working prototype, with real code and real applications. We pushed ourselves to deliver an actual product that could help people. The judge hit us with this crazy requirement to meet FDA-level standards (Like, come on, we’re students and we built it in few days, not a medical device company...)

And then, the 1st Runner Up goes to a team that… wait for it… claimed to use VR and the Metaverse to improve elderly lives—without any actual prototype or Figma. They just threw around buzzwords like “Metaverse this, VR that” in their presentation, with no demo, no functioning product, just slides. Yet somehow, they beat us out?

I’m all for futuristic ideas, but shouldn’t the bare minimum for a hackathon be having a working prototype? We spent so much time coding something real, while they didn’t even have anything tangible. It feels so unfair, and honestly, like a slap in the face to teams that put in the actual work.

Edit: If anyone wonders which Hackathon it is, I am Hongkongese and this is "GenAI Hackathon for SDGs" based in Hong Kong: https://www.hack4sdg.com/2024-event/teams/
The champion idea in the track is using prompts and pictures from the elderly to generate music, to recall their memory (by using only OpenAI API to generate it: https://openai.com/index/jukebox/); I saw a cool idea regarding DeepFake detection, but the judges aren't happy with their accuracy(~70%).

Would be happy to turn it into startup ish. I don't know. Contacted my professor in the field for his feedbacks after the loss and see how it goes. Being a STEM major in Hong Kong feels like playing on hell mode tbh. I will keep grinding on research & projects to see if I can branch out from this place. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Edit 2: Thank you all for the encouragement, it motivated me