LOL to each their own on that one, I love running nitro but electric is more popular around here now so I run it more. If you know your way around internal combustion engines thats pretty easy. More CAN go wrong with electric if you really don't know what your doing. I'm still more worried about cooking an electric setup than I've ever been running nitro, easy to tell in a few feet if the mixture is wrong, electric you know something is wrong when it lets the smoke out.
For a first boat go with a cat or mono hull. Outboard tunnels have to be set up near perfectly to run right, one of my favorites to run but take a lot of tuning and testing to get it right, but what fun when it is right! Hydros are somewhere in between in terms of difficulty, need to be set up well to run right, they are more sensitive to an improper setup than a cat or mono but easier to setup than a tunnel hull.
A mono will handle chop better than any other hull design.
If you would like to try your hand at racing I would suggest a mono hull, can be run in mono and offshore class with the same hull, just usually a prop change.
All three are a little out of your budget range but I really suggest saving for another week or two and looking at either the Revolt, Impulse or my first choice would be a Pursuit mono from Kinetec or Offshore Electrics. Much better motor and esc and a few inches longer, would be best to run a pair of 4s packs in it due to the slightly bigger boat and motor. Plus it's a proven race winning hull design, even if you don't want to race the hull handles great and is faster out of the box than the other two. A lot of people upgrade the other two with the motor and esc combo out of the Pursuit, that says something right there!