Looking to buy one. Advice on best bang for the buck. 1-1200 bucks limit.

I can advise you on the DJI Mavic 2 Zoom, but that is a little North of your budget.  I'd say that before you choose a drone, research the app called Litchi, which allows you to create flight paths with that can be uploaded to the drone and executed.  The advantage is you can fly the drone to the limits of its battery, well outside the limits of the remote control connection, with all the the picture/video taking, speed, direction, etc things activated at each waypoint.   For example, I have 35 minutes fly time and a range of about 2 miles on the remote.  With Litchi, I can fly it like 10 miles away executing all the commands that are loading into the flight path.

Fire it up, send it on its way, remote control disconnects after some time and you just wait for it to return.  My model has all of the GPS and collision avoidance detection, so there is 0 chance of a lost drone.  If you program something that exceeds your battery limit, it will abort at a certain point and come home.

Drones get kind of boring after a while when just limited to the range of the remote.  In before muh line of sight.

I have been looking at DJI from best buy. Those look interesting. I'll look up that app also.