IchII3D’s post worked like a charm. I set offset to a very small negative value and it worked like a charm. I had to tweak the curve and lower the strength a smidge, but the adjustments were intuitive.
Great that I found this thread, I’ve been searching the forums and for a momment I thought I was the only one seeing this. I haven’t used zbrush since 3.5, but I recall noise was OK then, I think this problem - imo it is a problem, there is no reason to spend time tweaking something to finally get a completely different thing applied to the mesh - was introduced in zbrush4. I disagree with support, this is something that should be fixed.