At the danger of sounding insensitive, you can't schedule these things to make everybody happy. Shift workers, doctors and nurses, there are lots of people who don't have "free" weekends. Like you, I also have a weekend hobby that conflicts with LD. This year, I'm going to miss out on most of Saturday again, but I came to the conclusion that in the end it can be a good thing - it forces you to work in a more economical manner. I'd take the Jam, however, not the Compo (with more time being the only deciding factor).
Yeah, I don't expect the time of the "weekend hackathon" to change. I am fine with this. Although it would be nice to have an option for diff people to take different days since it's all in good fun. What kind of irks me is that many hackathons seem to have winners decided by other criteria than the ones they state...
I know what you mean. LD is probably a lot fairer and more transparent than most though, because of the way voting is conducted. I also think it's one where "winning" doesn't matter as much. If you compare that to some sponsored events where the winners seem to be determined beforehand... I take LD over them anytime.
Of course, LD is susceptible to populistic/marketing style attacks, but not as much as it would seem (otherwise the guys who did Impetus would have won last time).
