ok so this has been bugging me for a while and i finally want to ask because i cant figure out if its a me problem or just a prebuilt thing. picked up a ready to fly 5inch a couple months ago, wont name the brand because i dont want this to turn into a brand argument, but the tune on it just feels off compared to quads i've built and tuned myself.

its hard to describe exactly but it feels kind of floaty? like there's a slight delay or mushiness when i initiate a roll, not oscillations or anything obvious, just less... connected feeling than im used to. props are balanced, i checked. motors spin up fine on the bench. i did load my own rates which maybe made it more noticeable because im used to higher acro rates.

looked at the PIDs and they're actually not that different from what i run on my own builds but something in the filtering setup looks pretty heavy, like they've got RPM filter and a bunch of gyro lowpass stuff stacked that i wouldnt normally run. wondered if that might be causing the lag feeling. anyone dealt with this before or know what to actually look at first

yeah the filtering is almost definitely your problem. prebuilt manufacturers tune these things to work on cheap props with potentially unbalanced motors fresh out of a factory and they basically just pile on filtering to cover for all of that. its a safe approach for them but it absolutely kills the feel, especially if youre coming from a tight custom build.

id start by pulling back the gyro lowpass, bump the cutoff frequency up a bit and see if that makes it feel more alive. you might get some noise back into the system but if your motors and props are actually decent it usually isnt a problem. the RPM filter should stay on, that ones worth keeping, but the stacked static filters on top of it are probably just adding latency for no real benefit in your case.

also worth checking if D term is cranked way up, thats another thing manufacturers do to make the quad feel stable in demo videos but it makes everything feel dampened and slow when youre actually trying to throw it around.

this is kind of the dirty secret of prebuilts imo. the actual hardware can be identical to something you'd build yourself but the tune is always made for the lowest common denominator pilot. i had the same experience, got a prebuilt thinking it would save time and ended up spending a whole afternoon in blackbox trying to figure out why it felt like flying through syrup compared to my other quads.

once i actually cleaned up the filtering and adjusted the D weight it was a different machine. kind of annoying that you still have to do that work but at least the hardware was sorted so it wasnt a total loss