so ive been flying for about a year now, started on a tiny whoop and worked up to a 3inch toothpick thing i built myself. honestly the build was fine but i spent way too many evenings fighting betaflight and reflashing ESCs and all that. now i want a proper 5inch freestyle rig and i keep going back and forth on whether to just buy something like an Iflight Nazgul or a Diatone Roma F5 instead of sourcing parts again.

my buddy swears by prebuilts because they come basically ready to fly and the PID tune is usually decent enough out of the box, but ive heard people say the stock tunes are pretty lazy and you end up tweaking everything anyway so whats the point. anyone here running a prebuilt 5inch as their main freestyle setup? curious what the actual experience is like vs something you put together yourself

been running an Iflight Nazgul Evoque F5 for like 8 months now and honestly it rips. stock tune was actually not bad for the first few packs but yeah i did go in and adjust the master multiplier and dropped the D term a bit because it was a little propwash happy on hard snap rolls. took maybe an hour total and its been my go-to since. the build quality is solid, solder joints looked clean when i opened it up, stack is well thought out. only thing i replaced was the motors after i cratered it into a concrete drainage ditch, which is not the drones fault lol

if youre already comfortable in betaflight the tune adjustment is no big deal, and you skip all the sourcing headaches. i still build my own sometimes but for a reliable daily flier the prebuilt route has been worth it for me

the Roma F5 has a really nice frame but i heard some early batches had issues with the ESC cutting out under hard throttle. might be worth checking the Diatone thread on RCGroups before pulling the trigger. not saying dont get it just do a bit of digging first