Have you considered a whoop for your first drone or adding one to this list instead of some of the extras? Sims are great and absolutely help a lot, but irl flying is still different, long range irl flying is even more different because of all the extra variables that appear. My 65mm and 75mm are still the drones I fly the most because I can fly them in my house/yard and not worry too much about pushing my skills and crashing. Where as your first time crashing at mid-long range is likely to end up being its own adventure. Also Canada seems like it gets pretty cold in the winter and that will kill batteries quickly. Snow also melts onto electronics pretty easily and can fry them. I have HDzero, Avatar, DJI and analog and analog is by far the one I fly the most because worrying less about breaking it helps me to expand my skills.
@Cakasparov I dont mean this in an adversarial way, but am genuinely curious and as you say this is a lot of money to potentially lose. When you practice on sim, I am assuming you only use acro, do you also have prop wash + damage, signal loss, battery drain, and cross wind turned on? and have you tried the sim in goggle? This stuff makes it a lot more realistic. I personally wasted a lot of money when I started and wish Id have just stuck with whoops a little longer. Broke my Cinelog30 v3 on the second flight and it sat in the box for another few months before I had enough skill to fix it and try again. At the same time, please dont be discouraged by any of this, stuff is going to happen no matter what you buy.
I spent over 40 hours on liftoff with an xbox before biting the bullet and spending 120 on my controller and batteries, getting uncrashed for more realistic flying. Planning on spending another 40 hours minimum to make sure I am truly interested. Ive been into drones for months now they seem so cool in concept but ive been terrified of getting them and getting bored after a few hours. Have not yet ordered the goggles.