so ive been building my own 5inch freestyle quads for like 3 years now and honestly im just tired of the build process at this point. i enjoy flying way more than soldering and i keep putting off fixing my main ripper because i just dont want to deal with it. been looking at the iFlight Nazgul5 V3 and also the BetaFPV Crux3 depending on whether i go 5inch or drop down to 3inch for more backyard stuff.

main thing im wondering is how these things actually fly out of the box vs after you've tweaked the rates and filters in betaflight. like are the stock pids anywhere close to usable or do you basically have to start from scratch the second it arrives. ive read some stuff saying the Nazgul comes pretty well tuned but also some people saying the filtering is super aggressive and mutes the feel. anyone actually flown both or at least one of them long enough to have a real opinion

had the Nazgul5 V3 for about 6 months, flew it mostly stock for the first couple weeks just to get a feel for it. honestly the stock tune is... fine. like it wont embarass you but you can def feel the filtering doing its thing, the stick response feels a bit delayed if youre used to a tight custom build. i ended up dropping the D term filters a bit and running RPM filtering which helped a lot. after that it actually feels pretty solid for freestyle, not as crisp as my handbuilt stuff but close enough that i dont really care on lazy days.

havent touched the Crux3 so cant help you there, but if youre mainly doing 5inch freestyle the Nazgul is a reasonable starting point. just budget like an hour or two in betaflight before you really commit to the tune.

crux3 guy here. its a completely different thing than a 5inch so kind of hard to compare directly. for backyard and tight spaces its actually great, motors are punchy for the size and the stock betaflight profile they ship with is surprisingly not terrible. i did bump my rates pretty quick because the defaults felt sluggish but the underlying tune held up fine once i did that. battery life is obviously way shorter than 5inch which gets annoying if youre used to longer sessions. if you mainly want to replace your freestyle 5inch i'd just go Nazgul and call it a day, crux3 is more of a second quad thing