I think a belt-drive 1/8 buggy would be cool. As for the flimsy-ness of belts, the solution is to go with a stronger one
. Some day in the future I would totally want to make a belt-drive 1/8 buggy, but it would be custom made so I could play around with different belt widths, pitches, and materials.
Heck I just thought about converting our normal ring gear bevel diffs into suitable belt-driven bevel diffs: just machine an adapter (like that adapter that would allow the old plastic Ofna 51t spur gear to fit on other diffs), and mount a machined pulley to it. Everything else would be cake.