It's not only a question of what's more convenient, there's also the question of risk allocation. I'm not familiar with fracking, but I'm sure there's concerns there, just like there are with nuclear fission. I still think fusion is a pretty cool concept. If we're really serious about developing fusion though, how about we stop bitching about a billion dollars and just pour enough money on projects that are worthwhile? We keep saving banks with that money every other day!
There's the example of W7-X in Germany, a stellarator design that'll never be energy efficient, but that's not the point I am making: they took ages designing and mismanaging everything until a science minister actually swung by the place, saw that the scientist were not getting anywhere because they were doing science and not managing the W7-X project, as it was. So the ministry scrapped the project and said: you can have all the funding back, plus a little extra, if you come up with a detailed plan how to build this thing in the next 7 or so years. If you miss a deadline, all your funding is gone. So the project went ahead, they got some actual project managers and consultants to work on the project and lo and behold: the system is almost finished. It just took enough pressure and some people that are actually trained for the job they're supposed to be doing to get that project humming!
So if we're serious about ITER, we need to put professional project managers in charge and not some consortium of scientists and politicians and bitch about who gets which share. The positions should go to the party most qualified for the job and not to a company in a country that didn't get contracts in the amount they poured in yet. If some countries want to pull out - fine, we just need to make sure we stop the finger pointing and the nationalistic attitude. If the Chinese can't provide quality steel, they shouldn't get those contracts! Working on that project is such a pain! Actually, fuck multinational projects, they're not going to work. If you want to build a power plant, devise a plan, get the best people working on the field to do it, secure the funding, put professionals in charge, check every two years if they're on track. That way, we might actually have fusion plants in 50 years. At the rate we're going now and with the projects currently under way, we never will.
TL;DR: multinational projects suck, too many economically motivated political bullshit; professional project managers should lead the project and not some senior scientist who has no clue about how to efficiently manage something on that scale; chance to get fusion plants in 50 years: >0.5. Chance to get fusion plants in 20 years with the currently employed system of running fusion projects: 1E-9.