DJI - Phantom 4 RTK

Alaska DOT has a fantastic drone program, I highly recommend contacting them. The P4RTK is on the older side but it still holds its own. Especially when the person using it understands site control. Speaking of, i would grab an emlid RS3 for your GCP collection. Drone2Map is fine, my personal preference is Reality Capture. It's free and honestly the photogrammetry outputs are superior to the likes of dronedeploy. Really it comes down to how you share your deliverables.

Not true, at least with earlier Phantom series drones. I had a "fly off" while trout fishing in rural Missouri several years ago. It started to rain shortly after I lost it and I had to head out. One week later, I'm back. I use the "find my drone" option and it gives me its "last known position". I follow it for about a 1/2 mile and there she is... directly in the middle of the Niangua river under 4' of water. I don't know how it works on the Avata, but the Phantoms have "last known location", not just "current location".

It does with sdk remote

They are 1/4 the price of a m3e and my surveyors and other contractors that work for them all say that the phantom creates better images still. I almost bought the m3e but I have 18 phantom 4 batteries and heaps of chargers so made sense to get the phantom.

Freefly Astro with A7RIV for mapping and construction monitoring. We also just acquired a Resepi XT32 lidar payload which has been very useful. Ground topo under trees has been extremely helpful with the lidar. Orthophotos for all our design work has also been great to have. Contours are also used for preliminary design but we need accuracies better than 1/16th of an inch for final design so that usually gets subbed out. We still have a Phantom 4 RTK but haven't used it much since switching over to the Astro.

I use the mini 4 pro. It should be easy to get a used one without a problem at this point. The thing with drones is a lot of people buy them, never use it and sell em. Before I got the mini I used various generations of the phantom starting on gen 1. I even used the first professional inspire model that was a freaking huge monster you could barely fit the case in a normal car. It’s absolute insane how a 250g foldable Mini 4 performs compared to back then. I don’t even start about how easy it is to fly them with all the fail save and automatic functions. 10 years ago you needed actual skill to fly great shots. Today it does it for you. I would recommend the controller with build in screen. It’s easier, it’s faster, it’s a lager screen, it doesn’t bug out and so on. The amount you can save here is not worth it in my opinion.

The P4 is a good drone and we used one for years. However, for the money, an M3E is a huge upgrade. Better camera, faster camera, longer flight times, etc. Plus the controller software is so nice. If you get to the point where you are doing a lot of flights, and you will, the M3E is an absolute workhorse that yields great results.

DJI minis are about the best you'll get. i don't have a mini but I'm still running my mavic pro platinum and a phantom 4. pretty sure the mini outperforms both of those 

A used phantom 4 RTK doesn't give up anything to the 3e in accuracy, just time and more batteries. If I was budget sensitive that's definitely a good idea.

It won't get bricked but depending on FAA changes it could make the drones illegal to fly. I can't legally fly my DJI Phantom 4 because it doesn't have a remote ID broadcast module. I can get an external module to attach to it, but that's beside the point I'm trying to make.

I mostly fly the DJI M300, but every so often I have to take the P4RTK out, and it feels like taking the DeLorean to the stone age. The data is great, but the UI/UX is painful compared to newer stuff. I finally upgraded to the Matrice 4E, first flight layer today!