Be aware of that cheap hardware also comes with its
major drawbacks such as power, noise and malfunction due to temperature
issues.
Having a good designed board is not only for fun. As an
example I remember the case of one autopilot (for a boat) employing a
low cost board, the magnetometer (from Honeywell HMC series) employed
as a pump capacitor a cheap tantalum one.
Well, that capacitor had a high resistor series under low
temperatures (below 5 degrees). All the test were in summer, so
everything was ok. In winter, because of that issue, the magnetometer
started to ruin the I2C communication (the chip hanged without freeing
the bus) and they lost the boat (fortunately they could recover it).
Imagine what would happen in an airplane.
Even for hobby, a flying machine takes a lot of time (we all
know this :P) and it is really annoying to see one crash because cheap
hardware. Besides for mass production, I would say it is really worthy
to spend 50 or 100€ more in a well tested
board. After all, in my opinion, if you can afford to have a
quadrotor or an airplane and its maintenance, you should go for
relative good hardware.