ok so this has been bugging me for a while and i finally have time to post about it. picked up a prebuilt 4inch from a brand ill not name yet, came with betaflight already configured and everything but flying it feels just off. like its not snappy, rolls feel mushy, and there's this weird bobbing thing when i come out of a fast forward flight into a hover. not sure if its a filtering issue or the pids are just trash or what. motors seem fine, no obvious vibration on the bench.

i've touched betaflight before but im not super confident just randomly tweaking pids and making things worse. what would you guys even look at first in this situation

the bobbing on deceleration sounds like it could be prop wash and the stock tune just isnt handling it well. first thing id do is pull the blackbox log if it has blackbox logging enabled, fly a short punch and fast forward run, then look at the gyro traces vs the PID output. if you see the P term going crazy on roll/pitch during that decel phase thats your culprit. most prebuilts ship with super conservative tunes because they have to cover a wide range of pilots and conditions so the D term especially is usually way too low for any kind of aggressive flying.

also check your RPM filter settings, if the motor magnets arent configured right its doing basically nothing and your filters are probably doing double duty. not trying to overwhelm you, just start with blackbox and go from there

yeah prebuilt tunes are almost always garbage for anything but the most casual flying, its kind of the dirty secret nobody wants to say because it undermines the whole plug and play marketing thing. i went through the same thing with mine, ended up just flashing a community tune i found for the same frame and it was night and day difference. obviously you gotta make sure the tune is for your exact motor and prop combo but it beats starting from scratch if youre not confident yet.

also the mushy rolls could just be your rates being set super low, worth checking that first before you go deep into pid land, might save you an afternoon