ok so i know this has probably been asked a million times but bear with me because my situation is a little specific. ive been flying cinematic stuff on a mavic for about a year and i want to get into fpv but im genuinely not sure if i should go the whole betaflight route or just get something like the avata 2 which is basically plug and play.

the thing is i actually want to learn to fly properly, like freestyle or at least get decent at manual flight eventually. i dont want to be stuck in a locked down ecosystem. but at the same time i hear a lot of people say the learning curve on a real fpv quad with betaflight is pretty steep and i dont want to just crash and burn through a bunch of batteries and get frustrated.

looked at the geprc cinelog 25 and the betafpv pavo25 as potential middle ground options, they seem a little more forgiving size wise. someone at my local club also mentioned the flywoo explorer but i couldnt find much recent info on it. is there a prebuilt that has a decent flight controller where i can actually mess with pid tuning and stuff when i get more comfortable, or is that basically any betaflight based quad

honestly if your goal is to actually learn freestyle eventually, dont get the avata. its fine hardware but youre gonna hit a wall pretty fast when you want to do anything beyond the cinewhoop style flying it was designed for. the DJI ecosystem is also just... its not really the fpv community if that makes sense. you cant tune it, cant swap parts easily, and the goggles lock you in.

the pavo25 or cinelog 25 are both solid starting points. theyre betaflight based so you get full access to tune whenever youre ready. i'd probably edge toward the geprc just because their customer support has been ok in my experience and the build quality feels slightly more solid. either way just expect to spend the first month doing low slow flights and not worrying about pids at all, get the muscle memory first then start poking around in betaflight

flew avata 2 for about three months before switching to a real quad and honestly i dont regret doing it that way. got comfortable with fpv orientation and reading the goggles without worrying about a tuning issue sending it into a tree. then when i moved to betaflight stuff i wasnt also fighting the learning curve of the software at the same time. so maybe not the worst idea depending on your budget, but yeah long term you will want out of that ecosystem