Helicopters by nature require tuning, work and constant maintnence. Failure to constantly keep ontop of your helicopter will often result in mechanical failure during a flight, and that usually ends up with a heap of a helicopter laying on the ground. If you want something just to fly around, stick to planes, because helicopters definiately aren't for you.

That said, there are some helicopters that don't require as much work as others, those specfically being fixed pitch helicopters. They're the most difficult of all the helicopters to fly, they don't like any type of wind (less than 3 mph), and they're not very stable in the air. However, they're cheap to repair, are very mechanically simple, and don't usually cost much to buy (you can get them for under $100). They make great trainers because of their hard-to-fly nature and crash resiliance. If you can master flying a fixed pitch helicopter, moving up to a bigger collective pitch one is a piece of cake.

Any collective pitch helicopter (like the t-rex or X-400) will require regular ammounts of maintnence and tuning, because the rotorheads are significantly more complex, theres more linkages, theres more areas for things to go wrong, and not being vigiliant in your inspections will spell disaster in the longrun. On top of this, collective pitch helicopters are typically more expensive initally because you'll need a computer radio to fly them aswell. The upshot is that they're much more stable in the air, they're easier to fly, and are often capable of aerobatics and good full forward flight (unlike most fixed pitch helicopters which REALLY don't like to do much other than hover around and very slow forward flight). They are, however, more expensive to repair, usually, and the bigger you get, the more expensive it gets.

Basically, you can only have one or the other, if you want easy to fly, you go collective pitch, but have lots of tuning and maintenence to get it flying well.

If you go micro fixed pitch, they're much harder to fly, but are resiliant to crashing, and don't require a whole lot of work to upkeep except when you break the odd thing here and there when you crash (which you WILL do, everyone does).

It's one of those things, you can't have your cake and eat it too, which begs the question, why have cake at all!?