Ignore anything the happens with the FFB and stick on the ground in the F4, it is a completely separate mode its in to not throw your stick forward.
First, make sure you update TelemFFB if you are using it or at least turn off the G effect because it interacts with HBs modeling of the bobweight and causes porpoising
Second, what I did was turn the F4 special options gains up to about 200% and I also added like 10% inertia and damping and 3% friction in VP configurator. These setting feel pretty decent so far.
That lack of feel when in the air at low speeds is just how that artifical pitch feel system works IRL, combined with the max force limitations of our hardware. Since the real plane can have 60lbs stick forces, when that is scaled to our 100% force on our rhinos that leaves the slow speed forces that IRL would be in the high single digits of LbsF to be almost unnoticeable on the rhino as set by default. There is a nice writeup on the ED forums about the nature of this issue with force graphs and all that I suggest you read through to understand how some settings could help you get the stick feel you want