I am one of those who always has the batteries charged up and ready to go. I fly pattern as well and trying to charge 12 individual packs (6 sets for the pattern plane, 2 wired in series per flight) the day I would like to go flying is not very practical. I could charge the night before if I know that I will go flying but half of my outings to the field are unplanned. The same holds true when I fly C/L. Now that I am flying C/L as well I do the same. I only put the batteries in storage mode at the end of the season and throughout the winter.
On the pattern side of things I normally get about 60 cycles out of the batteries before they start to go soft. Living in MI that means that on average packs will last for two seasons, sometimes three. I believe that C/L is more abusive of the packs because we are running at power levels that allow the model to stunt at any time. In R/C you would throttle up before a maneuver. As a result I would not expect my C/L packs to last quite as long. On the current 6S packs that I have they are starting to get a little soft at about 50 cycles. It is easy to tell because they take a few more mah to charge and I can see the IR starting to go up slightly. However, these are smaller packs than what I normally use in R/C and they are not horribly expensive (say $40-$50 depending on the brand). Also, the supply of small 6S packs has been limited so I have been charging packs at the field which means that some get 2 cycles per outing. At roughly $1 per flight I am O.K with it and the convenience of electric.
Teo