That's part of the knock. DJI Phantom owners are stereotypically kids (or adults) who know nothing about multicopters, but fly them around breaking all kinds of safety rules.
Does anyone know much about multicopters before they buy one? I know I didn't. Pretty much all I did was look up the regulations in various countries and then had at it.
Agruably, there's a significant difference between:
1: Collecting parts, soldering them together, programming and tuning a device, learning about how it all works, failing sometimes, then being able to fly 100'+ in the air
and
2: Buying a pre-built quad and skimming the FAA regulations. Unbox it and walk outside. Crank the throttle all the way to max and stare with glee as GPS keeps it at 10,000 feet right over your house.
This ends up sounding like "kids these days". Did you build your own computer? From the gates up? Oh, well then you're not a real engineer... It's usually an ego based distinction too.
Maybe, but it's hard to argue there isn't something to it. I think for each technology you can distinguish three types of users. 1) Those who care about it for itself - in this case the ones assembling their own drones, or willing to at least understand them on a deep level. 2) Those who treat it as just a tool, means to an end - think people doing air photos for money with drones. And 3), tourists - those who don't know a thing about the tech, don't want to know about it, but come drooling because it's cool and shiny.
Usually the third group does stupid shit (as in stupid stupid, not smart stupid), the first one gets angry at "kids these days", and the second doesn't care as long as it doesn't affect their use of their tools.
I find this model to accurately describe quite a lot interactions in the general tech sphere. So for instance in programming, the group 1) is what you call "hackers", and the primary folks who get religious over editors or programming languages. Group 2) mostly looks at it and says "meh". Those are the "product-focused" people, the "professionals". Group 3) are kids that try to flock to CS because it's cool and pays a lot.
Or, Google screwed up the deployment of Glass, because they marketed and sold it to rich people from Group 3) instead of Group 1) (Glass itself wasn't a good enough tool to create the Group 2) around it.).
Or all the remarks about how technology companies dumb down everything. That's Group 1) complaining that Group 2) designs stuff for Group 3).
If you were building your own vs buying one pre-built you would need to do a lot of research first. That would involve reading a lot of blogs and forums and watching a lot of videos. During that time you're bound to pick up a few things not directly related to which parts to buy.
