Buyer beware, Fine Design rips off yet again!

[Aceldama]

I still don't understand the reasoning behind converting the 5b to a brushless vehicle beyond noise reduction.

Converting nitro makes sense to me because:
-Nitro is expensive, $40-50 a gallon
-Nitro motors wear out somewhat quickly
-Carrying a glow starter and a tuning screwdriver and a fuel bottle around sucks
-Nitro is particularly messy
-It's easy in a nitro sized vehicle to get vastly improved performance from a brushless setup for a similar cost to nitro.

It's just not the case with the 5th scale gasoline powered RCs. Sure, gasoline is loud but it's way more durable/reliable than nitro and WAY cheaper to operate.

Why converting gasoline to brushless doesn't make sense to me:
-Same performance. I haven't seen a brushless 5b that was any faster than a gasoline 5b with a pipe. Hell, brushless actually seems slower.
-Much more expensive. Gasoline is really cheap, huge batteries/motors/escs are not.
-Much less runtime. I remember the guys on the Baja forums saying they were getting 40 minutes of runtime on a single tank.

I guess there's a uniqueness factor to it, it's fun to see the conversions. But personally if I had a 5b I'd just run gasoline. I don't feel like battery tech has come far enough to make anything above 1/8th scale make sense price vs performance wise.