so ive been building my own quads for a few years now and honestly im just tired of the assembly process at this point. not the tuning, i actually enjoy that part, but the soldering and sourcing parts and waiting for stuff to show up from china is just getting old. been looking at prebuilt options in the 5inch freestyle range and the diatone roma f5 keeps coming up but i cant tell if thats just old forum posts or if its still a solid choice

my main thing is i want something that flies decent out of the box but can actually be tuned properly, not one of those locked down things where you cant touch the pid controller or whatever. running my own tx16s so i just need something that plays nice with expresslrs or can be reflashed. budget is probably 200-280ish before battery and props

anyone actually flying one of these recently or is there something else i should be looking at in that range

the roma f5 is fine but honestly at that price point the iflight nazgul evoque f5 v2 has been the go-to recommendation for a while now. flies pretty well stock and the betaflight config they ship with isnt embarrassing, which is more than i can say for a lot of prebuilts. you will still want to go in and adjust the filtering and probably bump the d term a little but its not a disaster starting point

the elrs version comes with a decent receiver already soldered in so thats one less thing to deal with. only real complaint ive heard is the camera mount is a bit flexy but thats a 5 minute fix with some foam tape. weight is fine, motors are decent, its just a solid quad that doesnt make you fight it

i got the roma f5 like 8 months ago and its been good, had to reflash the vtx firmware cause it was doing weird power output stuff but thats pretty minor. the betaflight tune that came on it was honestly not terrible for freestyle, i changed a few things but didnt have to start from scratch or anything. only thing id say is check which version youre getting cause i think theyve done a few revisions and the earlier ones had some motor issues from what ive read