Front vs Rear wheel? Auto vs Manual?

Wow! Are these forums really new, or did I just miss the location of an archive of the old forums??

I have a '95 dodge intrepid. In a couple of years I plan to replace it and use it as a base for an electric conversion. It's gonna be a bit of a heavy lug, so I expect the range to be rather meager. My main question is: is there much of a difference between front and rear wheel drive as far as conversion difficulty goes? It seems rear wheel would be easier as one could just tie in where gasser met the transmission, whereas front-wheel drive means one has to deal with a transaxle.

Also, this car's an automatic. It seems like manual tranny would be easier to deal with as well, and wouldn't suffer loss from the torque converter. How does one deal with this situation? Is it common to just do without the tranny? This again seems like it'd be easier with a rear-wheel drive...