so anyway i've been messing with my PIDs for the past few sessions trying to get rid of some propwash i was getting on fast direction changes and now the whole quad just feels... slow to respond on rolls? like it still rolls fast in terms of degrees per second but there's this mushiness at the start of the input, almost like there's a delay but im pretty sure it's not actual delay.

running Betaflight 4.4 on a Mamba F722. rates havent changed. i did lower my P gains across the board because someone told me that'd help with the propwash and i also turned on iterm_relax if it wasnt already on, cant remember if it was on before or not.

flying 5inch, 2306 motors, gemfan 51466 props. the propwash is better but now it just doesnt feel right. feels kind of like flying through mud on the initiation of a roll.

yeah lowering P too much will absolutely give you that mushy feeling on input initiation. P gain is what makes the quad snap to your command quickly, if its too low you get that slow heavy feeling even if the end rate is the same. i'd bring P back up incrementally, like 5-10% at a time, and see where the propwash starts coming back. there's usually a sweet spot where both problems are manageable.

also check your D gains if you havent ? D is actually what helps more with propwash than P in most cases. if D is too low you lose the dampening on oscillations after the maneuver. iterm_relax is good to have on but its not a cure for propwash on its own, its more about stopping I term windup in fast moves.

could also be your master multiplier or RC smoothing settings if you touched those. ive chased this exact feeling before and one time it turned out i'd accidentally bumped my RC smoothing way up and it was adding latency to my stick inputs, which feels almost identical to what youre describing. worth checking the RC link tab in Betaflight just to make sure nothing weird is happening there before you go deep into PID adjustments.