Hi Cole,
I have several Heli's including 2 Shoguns, and one T-rex, I really have to say the Shogun is a better flying heli. The only problem with the shogun is the tail system. In order to get reliable tail, you need to upgrade to the beveled gear system, or the belt drive. One other upgrade is recommended, lower profile wide stance skids. The stock skids allow you to easily tip, and even I fell victim on first spin up of destroying my blades and bending the main shaft. Speaking of which, you might want to upgrade that main shaft too. All in all I'm talking of about $30 dollars worth of upgrades. My T-rex on the other hand was a pain to build. Not because the heli is complicated, but the parts just didn't seem to fit right. I had to mess around with soldering irons on every ball joint, including the swashplate one. The whole thing was so stiff, I actually killed the gears on an hitec hb56. After I got it working smoothly, its flight characteristics were not all that great. In order to get it flying decent, I had to upgrade to an aluminum swash, had to upgrade to the evo style CNC precision flybar control system, mixing arms, washout, and then had to litteraly grind some plastic off one of the blade grip to get rid of some of the shakes. I gave up on the blade grips and went CNC. I have it pretty well broken in, and for the money, I should have bought another Shogun. A nice thing about this heli is that the space between the frame and the rear horizontal stabilizer is a bit longer than the Shogun, allowing for an easy placement of a FMA Co-pilot. Which is great on these smaller heli's. It takes alot of the skittish nature of these smaller heli's out of the equation, and allows for a novice pilot to learn how to hover faster and without incident, and thats on a heli really designed for an intermediate and above pilot. I know first hand, I saw my 13yo son go from never having flown, to having a pretty stable hover. You can use a co-pilot with the shogun as well, it just takes a few times moving it foward and back on the boom to find the proper mounting position. Another advantage of the Shogun is you can get a 2300mAH battery, and it will fit into your canopy. It will give you 25-35 minutes flight time, as opposed to the 1900mAH on the Trex (Its hard to find a larger battery because of its canopy design). Because of its slightly larger blades on the T-rex, the 1900mAH battery seems to only give you about 11-17 minutes flying time. Either way you go, I hope you have fun and I hope my personal experience assists you in some way. Good luck in your decision.