Just a perspective;
My buddies and I went about it different ways when getting into this hobby. Now I'm not advocating one way or another, just sharing my experience...
They went the budget route, building out their drones for around 150-200 bucks. I ordered a BNF QAV-R from getfpv.com and spent 500 bucks (minus the goggles and radio). They had all kinds of small issues with theirs. Loss of video signal at short ranges, motors that weren't consistent in power delivery (might have been the ESCs), a crap load of learning and studying how to program in Betaflight/Cleanflight, but in a nutshell they had problems...
I had no issues with mine out of the box and it flies great. While I didn't know much about programming flight controllers and what all the settings mean and do, I am a Software Engineer, so it wasn't a big leap to learn from having a flying model and for lack of a better word, "reverse engineer" it. In the end a few months later we are at the same point in our knowledge and flyable drones. In the end they spend almost as much as I did on my BNF, but I didn't have all the headaches...
I will add that I spent probably a solid month flying/using FPV Freerider before ever flying my QAV. It made a huge difference when I actually got out and flew. I was able to fly around, do some simple freestyle moves without crashing immediately. This is not to say I didn't crash. I did, but it was huge augering in type crashes, but just a little too low or the biggest one, landing... I still use the simulator to learn new "tricks" and to stay sharp when I can't fly for a few days. Its not a one-for-one between the Sim and real life, but it take me maybe one battery pack to adjust...
