so ive been flying freestyle for maybe 6 months now and i feel like my quad is always fighting me when i try to do stuff like split s or anything that involves quick direction changes. its not awful but it just feels kinda mushy and slow to respond, like theres always a slight delay between what i do on the sticks and what the quad actually does. running betaflight 4.4 on a 5inch with 2306 motors. rates feel fine to me i think. not sure if its a filtering thing or pid thing honestly. anyone dealt with this

yeah sounds like it could be your D term being too high, that'll make it feel sluggish and unresponsive especially on fast inputs. also check your rc smoothing settings, sometimes thats what causes that lag feeling more than pids. what does your blackbox look like on a fast roll? if you dont have blackbox logging set up that would be step one tbh

i had the exact same issue last year and i spent like two weeks tweaking pids when the whole time it was my rates that were the problem lol. my expo was way too high so the sticks felt dead in the center and then suddenly snappy at the edges which made everything feel off. try dropping expo a bit and see if it helps before touching pids