so ive been building my own quads for a few years now but honestly im just tired of spending weekends soldering when i could be flying. been looking at prebuilt 5inch options and the Roma F5 keeps coming up but most of the reviews i can find are from like and im not sure how relevant they still are.

main thing im flying is freestyle, nothing crazy technical just bando and some open field stuff. i dont really care about GPS or anything like that. budget is somewhere around 250-300 for the quad itself, not including the receiver since ill be dropping my own in anyway.

how does it fly out of the box? ive heard the stock tune on these can be pretty soft and propwash-y but also heard people say a quick betaflight tune tightens it right up. also curious if the motors they ship it with are decent or if im gonna be swapping those out in the first month too.

had one for about 8 months. the stock tune is... fine? like it flies but yeah theres definitely some propwash in fast direction changes and the D term felt a bit low to me. spent maybe an hour in betaflight adjusting filters and bumping D up a bit and it was honestly a completely different quad after that. nothing crazy, just basic tuning stuff you probably already know how to do.

motors are the F40 2306 or something similar depending on batch, mine have held up fine but i know some people got a bad motor in their set. the build quality overall is solid though, nothing felt cheap or wobbly. for 280 bucks its hard to complain. i would say if youre coming from a self-build the maiden flight might feel a bit underwhelming but give it a tune first before you judge it.

why not just look at the Flywoo Explorer or one of the iFlight Nazgul variants at that price range? i feel like the Roma F5 gets recommended a lot just because of brand recognition but the Nazgul Evoque has been getting way better feedback lately for freestyle. not saying the Roma is bad just worth comparing before you pull the trigger