Hi Noah!
Here's what I will tell you regarding the price of equipment:
1) The most expensive equipment is not always the best:
2) Neither is the absolute cheapest piece of equipment.
What I can tell you is that the best FOR YOU will probably lie somewhere in between the absolute cheapest and the absolute most expensive. Most of the time, the most expensive pieces of equipment aren't the best for you because they're often overloading you with too many bells & whistles and settings, or they're going to get you features that you'll NEVER in a million years use - but someone doing 3D acrobatic flight with a helicopter, or flying a warbird with retractable landing gear, flaps, and a smoke system, or a glider with flaps, airbrakes, tow release, and telemetry WILL need that expensive stuff.
The same can be said for the absolute cheapest equipment. You'll find that they're lacking in certain features, the quality isn't good, someone wrote the manual in Programmer language, then translated it to Chinese, and then from Chinese to English, it doesn't support the full number of channels that you'll really need, etc.
Let's use the DXe as an example. This transmitter is perhaps the absolute cheapest Spektrum brand transmitter you can buy. It does not have a screen on it to program it like the other, more expensive models; instead, it relies on using a smartphone or PC to program. It has a max of 6 channels; it doesn't have any timers or alarms on it like the others do. Why would you want timers/alarms? Well, you want to know how much more flight time you have left on a battery, for example...Or, maybe you want to have different setups for a v-tail glider, or you need configuration for a helicopter. Those are some examples that the DXe might fall down on, where you might want the support a better quality transmitter offers. This is where buying the cheapest radio might suffice for a little bit, but you grow out of it really quickly as you get more experienced, and realize that what you really need is something like a DX6e or DX8, if you're staying within the Spektrum line.
This applies not just to the radios in this hobby, but to things like battery chargers and batteries as well. Certain batteries can only be charged by certain chargers, or will charge exceptionally slowly on some chargers. The cheap knockoffs may not have the best quality, leading to a higher possibility of shorts or possible failures resulting in fires. Or, in the case of batteries, they don't hold a charge as long or have a tendency to puff up.
What I can tell you is to do your research a bit; feel free to ask questions here on what you want to know more about, and we'll do our best to help you. Ultimately, the decision is yours, but we want you to be informed in your decision and at the same time, want you to enjoy the hobby, not hate it 6 months in because you can't fly well and the issue is due to poor equipment (i.e., you bought a cheap, no name receiver that lost signal 200 feet away), or you've got a case of buyer's remorse over something you'd wished you put money into for a feature actually need, but it's not available on the cheapest model.