so i finally caved and bought a prebuilt after everyone kept saying they were good now. got an iFlight Nazgul Evoque, put it next to my personal 5inch which is running an F7 stack, 2306 motors, the usual stuff. flew both back to back at my spot yesterday and i have some thoughts.

the Nazgul actually doesnt feel bad at all. out of the box the tune is pretty smooth, propwash on hard reversals is noticeable but not terrible. my scratch build still feels crisper on quick direction changes and the roll rate just feels more... alive? hard to describe. but for the price difference its honestly impressive how close it is.

one thing that bugged me is the VTX power felt a little weak in my area compared to what im used to, might swap it out or just boost it in the CLI. also the camera angle was way too low for how i fly, like 10 degrees, bumped it to 25 and it felt way better immediately. anyway just thought id share since i see a lot of people asking if prebuilts are worth it. answer is kind of yes now, at least for a backup or loaner quad.

the camera angle thing catches everyone off guard, i think they set it low on purpose so it feels more approachable to beginners but yeah for anyone who actually flies aggressively its way too conservative. 25-30 is where most people end up.

curious what motors are on your scratch build and what props youre running on both, that could explain the difference in feel more than the tune honestly. prebuilts tend to come with props that are fine but not always optimized for the motor kv.

ive been saying for a while that the gap is closing but people still act like prebuilts are trash. glad someone actually did a real comparison instead of just assuming. the VTX thing is a known issue on a few of the iFlight models, theres a CLI command to unlock it but dont quote me on the exact one, someone posted it in the iFlight facebook group a while back i think.