Building a new long range Rekon 7 Pro. Using SpeedyBee F7 v3. Just flaashed BF 4.4, but cannot get motor direction to change. Used BF and BFheli32, both. But no luck. Could this be because I didn't disconnect the SBUS wire?

Connection of a receiver SBUS wire to the FC has no relevance to your issue.

There is a bug in Betaflight 4.4.2 that prevents the motor direction being changed so the only way to do it until the bug is fixed is to use BLHeliSuite_32 (or ESC Configurator if you are running 16-bit BLHeli ESCs). There should be no reason why BLHeliSuite_32 won't change the motor directions.

What ESC do you have and what is the exact procedure are you doing in BLHeliSuite_32? After changing the motor direction settings for the relevant motors in the GUI, are you clicking on the "Write Setup" button? You need to do that to save any changes you made to the ESCs.

Betaflight only sets itself up, its the ESC firmware BLHeli/BLHeli32/etc that sets the motor direction.

Nothing to do with SBus.

Assuming you are not setting it up for the possibility of motor reversal in flight for inverted flight, then you can force motor direction change by swapping any two wires of the three from the motor to the ESC.

If you want to persist with electronic set up then screen grab the ESC settings page and show us here.

Thanks!

You can also just swap one of the wires and it'll reverse the direction. Not as clean, but it works.