"Are pancakes and hotcakes different things?"
No. It's a dialect thing. Where I come from, they're called "pancakes" and the term "hotcakes" (or for that matter "flapjacks" and various other names) is basically never used. I use my grandmother's recipe, which calls them "pancakes". But in other places "pancakes" could be the rarely used term.
. . . Wait, she used a mix?! I mean, those aren't terrible, but pancakes are really easy to make from scratch. The dry ingredients is just flour, sugar, baking powder, little bit of salt. That's it! Then eggs, milk, oil and you're done. There's no real need for whipping egg whites--my ancestral waffle recipe does that, I figure to counteract the waffle iron's tendency to squish the batter down, but for pancakes you don't need that extra lightness. You don't need to fiddle with water in the frying pan either. Pancakes are a simple working class thing. Just sift the dry ingredients, mix the wet ingredients, add the wet to the dry, and fry 'em up. The only slightly finicky bit is don't let the temp get too high, because then it can start to burn on the outside while still being gooey in the middle.