been running iflight gear for a couple years now, have a succex stack in my 5inch and an xl5 v6 frame. its fine, nothing to complain about really but im kind of bored and a friend is selling his diatone roma f5 for cheap so im thinking about picking it up as a second quad.

my impression of diatone has always been that they make nice looking stuff but the build quality control is a bit inconsistent, had a friend who got a dead ESC out of the box on his mamba setup years ago but that might have just been bad luck. curious if anyones been running diatone stuff more recently and whether they feel like quality has improved or if its the same gamble it used to be. also specifically interested in how the roma f5 handles compared to a 5inch iflight because they have slightly diffrent geometry and im wondering if it flies noticeably different or if betaflight just smooths all that out anyway

diatone had a rough patch for sure but the stuff ive flown from them in the last year or so has been pretty solid. the roma series specifically feels well thought out, the frame flex is minimal and the stack they ship it with isnt some rebadged mystery ESC. i flew one back to back with my nazgul evoque at the field last summer and honestly the diatone felt a bit snappier in rolls, could be the different prop config we were running though so take that with some salt.

the dead ESC thing you mentioned is kind of an everyone problem, ive had dead motor outputs from iflight stuff too. i think at this price tier you just have to accept that QC is not going to be aerospace grade and keep spare ESCs on the bench regardless of brand.

geometry differences between frames at the 5inch size are real but betaflight filters and your rates are going to mask most of it unless youre a really dialed in pilot. if your friend is selling it cheap just grab it, worst case you swap the stack into a different frame if you dont like the roma and youre still ahead financially. diatone or iflight honestly at this point its splitting hairs for freestyle, neither one is going to make you fly better