Consumer/hobbyist drones are definitely going to get regulated. Drone enthusiasts need to get on top of this and work to ensure that they end up with a good regulatory scheme.

I think a good model would be the way radio is regulated.

In radio, there are consumer hand held transceivers that require no license on the part of the consumer. If you are, say, going camping and want radios for communications among your party, you can just go down to Walmart and pick up a set of these radios, and you are all set.

The manufacturers of these radios are regulated. The radios have to limit themselves to certain frequencies and power levels, and have to be certified by an FCC approved testing to meet all the FCC technical requirements.

These radios are all fairly low power, and operate on frequencies that usually are limited to dozens of miles range, so there aren't many ways that someone misusing these radios is going to cause much trouble.

For people who want to operate on frequencies that can propagate hundreds or thousands of miles, or who want to use high power, or who want to be radio technical geeks and hack their hardware or even build their own transmitters or RF amplifiers (note that all of these are activities where it is easy to cause trouble if you mess up), they can do that if they get an amateur radio license.

This is not a huge barrier. The entry level license (the technician class license) allows all the things I mentioned above, except it only allows limited access to the long distance frequencies, is pretty easy to get. The general class license, which opens up frequencies in all the amateur frequency bands, is a bit more difficult but still not too bad. (There's one more, the extra class license, that is a fair bit harder to get, but it doesn't open up any new capabilities--it just makes some more bandwidth available in some of the bands, and allows for callsign formats that are not available the other license classes).

Then there are various commercial licenses that become relevant for people setting up professional radio systems for business or industrial use. These are the kind of system that you aren't just going to decide you want and go out and buy. We're talking things where you are going to get radio pros to design your system, deal with getting the licenses you need, and setting things up.

An analogous scheme for drones could work something like this:

1. Simple drones that have limited range and altitude (probably enforced by software on the drone) and weight and carrying capacity can be bought and operated by anybody. For the average consumer who is looking for a fun toy to fly around their property, and occasionally use for something productive like checking to see if it is time to clean the gutters or finding out where the hell their frisbee went, this would be all they need. It would not be legal to modify these drones.

2. If you want to carry heavier loads, or go higher, or farther, or hack your drone's hardware or software (or build your own drones), you'd have to get an amateur drone license. These would be similar to amateur radio licenses in that they would not be too difficult to obtain--mostly they just ensure you are somewhat aware of the legalities of operating a drone and what you must do to operate responsibly.

3. If you want to operate commercially, or build or hack drones for others, or operate at long range or very high, you'd have to get a more comprehensive license.