I think everyone's covered things pretty well to be honest. @R120 has summed things up well with regard to the Decathlon option and as an owner of a HT and FS, the pro's and con's.
I started with the Hard Tail option. It was cheap (relatively) ticked all the boxes for everything I imagined I would be doing. It looked a bit at least some thought had been put into the design. Anything similarly priced looked like someone had electrified a bike they'd found down the tip. The stunning .. Decathon E-st500 ! Hub motor and all .. So if you want a hard tail and you don't want to spend much, don't plan on progressing much further than fire roads, then you'd probably be ok with one of these. The early ones weren't very reliable .. I think 48 hours was the most I got between fails. But they've sorted that out now.
One of the main problems with EMTB HT's is their made primarily with budget in mind. On average they're about £1000 less than their FS counterpart. At first glance you think you're paying £1000 for a rear spring and some joints. Invariably, you're not, every component is normally the cheapest they can find to get the price down and still have some profit in there.
The decathlon went back as the reliability wasn't something I could live with. I'd also discovered single track and some downhill and the bike wasn't really upto any of this.
Determined that HT was the way to go, who needs rear suspension, your body can do all that, it's lighter, more efficient, FS is for gods or show off's ... So I bought an e8000 hardtail .. for three times the price of the decathlon. It was an eye opener. It genuinely felt like 20 years of evolution. So much easier to ride, more confidence inspiring, plus sized tyres which felt like they gave me Full suspension . I was going to be unstoppable ! 2 days later, feeling immortal, but not realising that I'd got things the wrong way round and it wasn't gods who ride FS bikes, but Gods who could ride a hardtail as fast as an FS bike .. had a huge fast OTB on a DH track and fractured my pelvis.
Oh how I wished I'd had an FS bike and not a HT as I pottered about at 1mph whilst I recovered. Was supposed to be on bed rest and couldn't walk .. but with the dropper post down I could straddle on from behind and at least walk the dog. Every tiny bump hurt.
I persevered for about another 4 months .. got faster .. fell off lots .. got faster .. fell off lots more .. crashes were measured in "crashes per mile" . Eventually I realised that I just simply could not go any faster on that bike. Someone else could. But I couldn't. Not safely anyway. As it was, I was generally riding at about 150% of my ability using a riding style which more closely resembled pinball than mountain biking.
Enough was enough .. I admitted defeat and bought a Kenevo.
Convinced it would be some unwieldy beast which would spring along as I pedalled like an exaggerated cartoon bike.
Nope. It was simply amazing. For two weeks I only thought one thing "why why why didn't I buy an FS bike at the start". I probably would have avoided 90% of my accidents for starters. It doesn't boing about. It's not less efficient or slower. Gnarly cross country sections where I'd ridden my heart out and set times which I thought were unbeatable, I instantly went 30% faster on.
Basically .. if as you say you're drawn to adrenaline.... you will drift off the fireroads. You will want to go faster .. An FS bike just makes this all a bit safer and less exhausting. A DH run on the HT would leave me completely physically depleted, to the point that you're not safe riding.
The big difference you have here is that you can actually buy a decent FS bike within your original budget. It's not even a decathlon homegrown rockrider. It has all he advantages of being designed and made by a dedicated mountain bike company and then re-badged and sold through decathlon, so you have all the advantages of easy support and spare parts which are cheaper and more readily available. You also have the huge advantage, that if you absolutely hate it, you can take it back in the first 12 months. Just seems like an absolute no brainer.
