My 2 pennies?
HWs strike me as a pain, due to their size and weight they're difficult to work on, move around, lift and transport. They're also more expensive to build.
Most young people getting into the sport start with AWs, although they strike me as very fiddly (maybe they have smaller hands than me....) and then the good middle ground and popular class is FWs.
Also for me the fun is in building them but nothing wrong with buying one. You could learn a lot from it and have instant fun, but I'd do a little homework first. Although they're 'combat robots' once you start poking around inside they can easily break if you don't know what you're doing.
FWs often come up for sale on the forum, some HWs do and some people will even build one for you.
I know Mario (Maddox) and his lot build custom parts for bots and often help build other's machines so you could drop him a line.
£500 is a decent budget for a FW (5 times what my team spent on our first!) but most likely not enough for a HW.
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