I am building my first drone and it appears that there are a ton of cheap brands that have varying quality.  What OEMs/brands do you trust?

I am researching motors and ESCs right now and I am not really sure what manufacturer I want to go with.  I have been looking at KDE and T Motors.  I was about to pull the trigger on KDE but then found some posts on other boards that said the data that KDE provides is way off.  Everyone seemed to still like them but it makes it very difficult to design with.

My general design criteria:
Use cases: aerial photos, possible thermal down the road for fun, general use
Quadcopter with camera, telemetry, lidar, GPS
Currently have a 500mm frame
Looking at 10" props
Weight: 800g*, I have considered designs that range from 1.6 to 2.1kg
Figure since this is a drone my design for motors/props would be a 2:1 thrust ratio
*excluding motors, ESCs, props and batteries (figure there are dependencies there that I will need to have a full solution for before I have final weights for)

I am completely open to design considerations and general input.

T-Motors has always been really solid.  Skorpion is better.

I would be very careful about what you "read".  There are a lot of drone guys that are new and fail to learn basics.  They blame the gear.  People solder like crap and blame electronics.

They also tend to follow trends.  First they loved Frsky, then it was the worst thing ever.

Start with a good vendor like Racedayquads or GetFpv.

Emax and Hobbywing have a long history of producing solid stuff.  For FCs I have had good luck with Matek.

Anything lumenier is gtg.

Innov8tive RC for motors
His new line of BadAss motors are getting good reviews/acclaim
He used to sell scorpion, still has cobra motors and some others.

He does a lot of prop testing too and has tables for most motors/battery/prop dia-pitch combinations

Yes, but I noticed some of their stuff seems to be re-branded or share the same manufacturer and at a higher price tag.

That is a lot of drone/fpv stuff.  GETFPV at least stands behind their stuff.

For bigger 10in stuff I was using Brother Hobby motors.

3115 640kv on 6s gave decent performance, I came from FPV style racing drones so when I say decent I mean being able do the things I liked.   Built my own 18650 batteries in a 6s2p configuration.   Could get into 18-20minute flight times while acting like a relative jack ass on the sticks consuming battery power.

Takes wattage to fly so if you drive up voltage you can reduce the headroom of amps needed to hit the total wattage.

Sony VTC5D cells when running in parallel got me into that realm for a long duration cruiser.  6s2p for 5600mah at 25v fully charged and flying down to a voltage of 3v per cell.

Could potentially do same cell count for 4s3p and try to run something like a 12 or 13 inch prop, less RPM but more blade area.   Will be hard to find a 12inch tri-blade but a 13 is a vommon Xclass prop but they will be heavier glas nylon.