First of all, this is a nitro stadium truck forum. If you want a nitro MT, go to the monster truck forum.

Back on topic, nitro is more complicated but there is nothing more realistic than a nitro car. Once you get a good tune on it, just put your temp gun and tuning screwdriver in your pocket and after you ran about 10 minutes check temp. 90% of the time it will be within 200-280 which are good running temperatures. You only need to adjust the needles when there is a temperature or humididy change. So once you get it tuned, 1 hour leaner or richer is all you need. You need to clean the air filter after every hour of runtime and clean the car up more often since nitro is messy at times.

Do you want to run it at your track at all? If you get a MT, forget about racing it. It will be worse on a track than your XXX-T. 1/8 buggies and truggies are the F1 cars of RC. You can get a good RTR buggy for $275 (caster RTR from holeshothobbies.com and Ofna Hyper TQ Black) and a good RTR truggy for $300 (Thudner Tiger ST-1 from amainhobbies.com).