Glow engines, particularly the YS 4 strokes such as 175 or 185 have terrific field manners. But if you don't know how to tune one, best to stay with electric. Their fuel and maintenance cost tend to be high
The newish gasoline 2 stroke from OS, the GT33, is a tremendous powerplant for 2 meter pattern particularly when piped. That's what I use. But it takes tuning to achieve simple and reliable results. This is by far the cheapest way to fly the same pattern (inclusive of initial cost, season feeding cost and maintenance cost).
But again, if tuning is not your thing, best to stay with electric. Sure it is much more expensive overall, especially considering the learning curve and the inevitable blown components, but this should be balanced against ease of use. Anymore, electric is plug and play.
The 185cdi is the best YS engine yet and I don't agree that they are expensive to run and maintain. I mix my own fuel, 30% nitro and 10% Coolpower MV and it costs $1.65 AUD (approx. $1.28 USD), per flight.
I have 400 flights on one of mine and I have replaced bearings once and 1 spark plug. It doesn't get much cheaper than that. Compare that to the cost of batteries, chargers and in some cases generators and IC is very cost effective.
But I do agree, you need to know what you are doing.