I held off a bit on this life time of an engine but I'd heard about that report saying 15 hours. Sure it's possible to wear one out in 15 hours but you'd really have to be doing something stupidly wrong. And that means too lean, wrong or not enough oil, running it in a sandstorm and so on. Treated with a little care and common sense an average flier should get at least 100 hours. Treated like TF does then up it to hundreds of hours. In CL stunt flying where the engine is always quite rich 1000 hours is far from uncommon.

Duke Fox once tried one of his old technology cast iron piston 35's and ran it for 8 hours a day every day trying to wear it out. He got to 2000 hours and it had no discernible wear so he stopped the test. But this was using the correct fuel for that engine. He then ran one on normal RC fuel and the engine was ruined before it could run out the tank.