ok so ive been lurking here for a few months and finally decided to actually get into fpv properly. ive done some sim time on velocidrone and i have a radiomaster boxer already so the controller side is sorted. my question is basically whether to just grab something like a geprc mark5 or a diatone or whatever prebuilt option and get flying fast, or whether to go through the pain of building something from scratch first

everyone i talk to in real life says just buy prebuilt and get flying, but then i read stuff online saying if you dont know how to build it you wont know how to fix it when it crashes and itll just sit broken on your shelf forever. i dont have a ton of money to throw at this, probably around 300-400 bucks for the whole quad setup not including goggles. whats the actual honest answer here because ive been going back and forth on this for weeks

the "you wont know how to fix it" argument is kinda overstated in my opinion. yeah if you build from scratch you learn more but prebuilts these days like the geprc stuff or even the iflight nazgul series come pretty well sorted and you can still learn to repair as you go. ive seen plenty of guys build their first quad, have something not work right, get totally demoralized and quit before they ever fly. if your goal is to actually fly and have fun then a prebuilt BNF is not a bad call at all. just make sure whatever you get is running betaflight and not some locked down firmware, and that spare parts are easy to source. geprc and iflight both have pretty decent parts availability

built mine from scratch and i dont regret it but i also spent like three weekends just troubleshooting a ESC that turned out to be a dodgy solder joint. if i had just bought a prebuilt i'd have been flying way sooner. honestly at the 300-400 price range a BNF 5inch from a decent brand makes a lot of sense, the margins on those are thin enough that they're not ripping you off that bad. save the scratch building experience for when you inevitably want to go smaller or try a different frame. also the radiomaster boxer is a solid choice btw, good starting point