How often do you update the Betaflight firmware?  If a quad is flying well, what is the advantage to updating?  If a quad arrives with older firmware from the manufacturer should you assume that is the firmware that will work best on that model?  Should you update incrementally or wait for amore significant update?  When do the risks of updating outweigh the advantages?

Also, what about updating radios?

if the quad flies nice, there is no need to update.
if you believe it can fly better and like to experiment, go for it... save way with a backup.

i never had an issue with bf firmware updates, i guess there is a very no risk on stable releases.

as example my actual route is betaflight 4.2 is special nice for all 5inches with uaw from 350g uaw or more or on micros on the heavy weight; a 3inch with power but 300g uaw.
i prefer emuflight or bf3.5 for all my ultralight builds.
probably its more my ability of settup and tuning than the ability of the software itself. its noticable low settup work on ultralight builds or micros for me, i doesnt look for enter more ability to settup bf4.2 on ul or micros, i get the results i like anotherway.


i dont thrust as much in opentx updates than in bf, i update my firmware rarely.
you can watch the update notifications, if you see anything seems usfull for your need or if it should improve features still in use; that could be reasons.
if you update your radio this can mean you wont be able to fly any quad, a single quads bf version update wont be such a risk xD no flying is true danger xD

I live life on the edge so I tend to update when a new version comes along, but only stable releases (with the exception of Crossfire firmware which I'm comfortable to install and use beta versions of). As long as you take a backup of any settings before you update, you always have the option of reverting back again if something doesn't feel right. The only caveat with upgrading Betaflight is if you have custom tuned your quad and you move to a different minor version (i.e. BF 4.0.x to BF 4.1.x or BF 4.1.x to BF 4.2.x etc.) because doing that generally means you have to tune from scratch again which can be a PITA, especially if you have a number of quads. In that case it might be wise to just stay on an older version that you know is already tuned and working well.

At the end of the day it's really your call. Everyone has their own differing opinion.

I'm thinking of moving my whoops and micro quads to Emuflight because there seems to be less major changes between each version so moving forward with new releases on that will be less of a concern, plus it's supposed to work nicely on micro quads with either no or minimal tuning required.

Thanks for addressing this! I’ve been on the fence and finally got used to 4.2 which works well and no issues with my quads. I was under the impression you had to update.