so ive been flying a mavic for like two years and im finally wanting to get into actual FPV freestyle stuff. watched way too many mr steele and fpvknowitall videos at this point lol. my question is whether i should just buy something like a nazgul or a diatone prebuilt or if i should just bite the bullet and build from scratch. everyone seems to have strong opinions on this and i honestly cant tell if the "build your own" crowd is just being gatekeepy or if theres actually a real reason to do it that way. budget is probably around 300-400 for the quad itself, not counting goggles and controller which ill figure out separately.

also leaning toward a 5inch setup but open to arguments for 3.5 or even a toothpick if that makes more sense for learning. mostly want to do park flying and maybe some light woods stuff eventually

honest answer - prebuilt has gotten way better in the last couple years so the old argument of "youll need to fix it yourself so you should build it yourself" doesnt really hold as much weight now. like the iflight nazgul evoque or the diatone roma stuff is genuinely solid out of the box. that said building your own you learn the thing inside and out which DOES matter when you're on a field at 7am trying to figure out why your vtx is cutting out.

if budget is your main concern and you just want to fly, get a prebuilt. if you have a few weeks to actually enjoy the process, build one. its not really about the flying in the end, its about what kind of experience you want getting there. i built my first one and it took me like 3 weekends but i could basically fix anything on it from memory after that.

I went prebuilt first (nazgul5 v2) and dont regret it at all tbh. crashed it into concrete like 4 times in the first month and had to replace motors and an arm and going through that repair process taught me almost as much as building would have i think. maybe not quite but still. just make sure whatever you get runs betaflight so you're not stuck in some proprietary firmware hell