True hackathons, where everyone's technical, in the same place, and miles of lines of code are written on no sleep, pizza, and Mountain Dew, are really hard to come by, because few talented people have the spare time to do them, and they don't typically pay all that well. Older hackers also tend to avoid them because they're more likely to have incompatible family obligations.
The terminology doesn't suit it, but it's widely used, like "Software Engineer".
All that matters are the financials. If your experiment is validated with point and click tools, no shame in that. Prove it with one enormous Excel spreadsheet doing the heavy lifting if you have to. You are solving business problems, regardless of the tools you use.
There are other hackathons I've been to that emphasize deeply diving into a technology or tool. They both have their place. Given that YC is in the business of identifying startups, I don't think it's a surprise that it leans towards an "idea-athon" like you said.