so ive been flying for about 8 months now, started with a tiny whoop to learn and crashed that thing into oblivion, now im looking at getting into proper 5inch freestyle. my buddy keeps telling me to just build my own but honestly the time investment is kind of intimidating and i already have a full time job and two kids so like... is it actually worth it anymore or have prebuilts gotten good enough that im not leaving a ton of performance on the table

ive been looking at the iflight nazgul evoque and also the diatone roma stuff. seems like they ship betaflight tuned already which is cool but i keep reading that the default pids are garbage and you have to retune anyway so whats even the point. also confused about whether i should care that much about the exact fc/esc stack they use since ill probably swap motors eventually anyway. anyone gone from prebuilt to custom and felt a big difference or am i overthinking this

honestly the prebuilt argument made way more sense like 4 or 5 years ago when they were shipping genuinely bad hardware. these days the iflight stuff especially isnt bad out of the box, the evoque f5 v2 uses decent enough components. you will want to reflash betaflight and retune, that part is true, but thats like an hour of work and theres a million tune baselines on github you can start from. not a huge deal.

that said if you have the time to learn to build, you learn the quad way better and fixing stuff in the field gets a lot easier. i built my first quad back when betaflight was still cleanflight and i genuinely think soldering your own stack teaches you things you cant get from just plugging in a prebuilt. but if your time is short, grab the evoque, tune it on a weekend, fly it. youre not leaving that much performance on the table at the freestyle level unless youre trying to compete or something

i went prebuilt first (had the nazgul5 v2) and then built my own about a year later and honestly the performance difference wasnt as dramatic as people on youtube made it sound. the bigger differnece was just knowing exactly whats in my build and being able to diagnose problems faster. my prebuilt had a mystery esc issue that took me forever to track down because i didnt really understand the stack layout