I don't know how accomplished your buddy is and i'm not putting him down here.

I would classify myself and in Intermediate pilot, tic-tocs, flips, inverted flying and hovering.
I've spent a lot of time learning to be good at setup, you can't be a good flyer if you are not good at setup.

So I bought my little boy the Axe CP v3 and right out of the box it was flying pretty good.

After a few fun training sessions with him I decided to dial the heli in a little more.
I increased the gyro gain, leveled the swash plate.
I was very impressed how solid this thing was after a putting a little bit of my know how into it.

I can say that the on board gyro is not all that great. When you punch the collective you can see the tail kick to the side.
This wouldn't make for a good 3D heli because of the poor gyro, but I've now purchased the mini ESC so that I can put GY-401 gyro on it. That should be a fun project.

If your heli is way out of control, something is wrong with the setup, this little bird is the most stable bird in it's class.
Try the Blade CP and you'll see how out of control a heli in this class can be.