I am newly registered to the forum although I have been following it for some time. I am not a total newb to Kdenlive as I have been using it since a while to edit videos out of my smartphone, however I consider myself a total newb as far as more "professional" editing and related topics.

Now on to the reason of this post, I am looking for advice about which camcorder to purchase for a specific project which involves shooting footage of sporting events, edit it in kdenlive and publish it on a youtube channel. So I sure need better than a smartphone, especially I need some optic zoom, reason why I am planning to buy a cheap camcorder for these specific task.
Editing involves slowing down to about 50%, adding titles, ranking tables and such.

For this purpose I have been looking at these pocket cameras from 2010-2012 like the JVC GZ-E100 or Canon Legria HF R16 which can capture at 1080i 50fps which can be found for cheap on ebay. These little cameras come with a good optical, fast focus zoom which is the real plus for the purpose.
As far as resolution I dont' think I really need HD. I'm afraid uploading HD content would take forever, and I run Kdenlive on an I3 with 4 gigs ram so HD editing would possibly require resources that my machine do not have. Furthermore most sport events are still being broadcast in SD, so for all these reasons I dont' really think I need better than 720.
My question is about interlaced and downscaling to 720 if required.
Many says interlaced should be avoided whenever possible when content is going to be edited, especially when editing involves slowing down - which is exactly my case.
Other say it depends on the editing software and the intended use of the final video, which in my case happens to be youtube - which doesn't support interlaced.
So I have a doubt if these camcorders I am talking about are a good choice for my purpose or if I should go with something different, perhaps even something older like those hard drive SD camcorders which don't seem to acquire interlaced. Not sure camcorders from that generation feature 16:9 recording which I want to have so I don't get those ugly "pillarbox" on youtube, or if they can offer an acceptable quality when compared to those I mentioned previously.
In conclusion I am not sure if going for a 1080i camcorder is a good choice for my purpose, and how this may impact on the editing, what issues I may run into when editing interlaced content in Kdenlive, or scaling down to 720, and on the quality of the video once it gets published on youtube from interlaced.

I know this is not a strictly "software related" subject, and I may have asked these question on any video forum.
However since I understand that the editing software of choice has much to do with the results obtained from interlaced content editing, I decided to look for help on this forum, instead of others where most users seem to be using different editing software such as Avid, Adobe etc.

I really hope someone will shed some light on the subject and help me get the type of camcorder that best fits my purpose. Sure it's no big investment, but no reason to throw away money on something which may just turn out to be wrong.