I imported a netlist from eeschema into pcbnew, and that’s fine, but I find that component values appearing in F.Fab layer can’t be disabled! See the example here
Note that creating further items in F.Fab, such as lines or text, they correctly hide when I disable view on F.Fab …
%R and %V will hide with the layer, REF** and VAL** will hide when you disable the Reference and Values rendering option in the Render Tab.
Those cryptics are used in text fields or reference/value fields in the footprint editor to get the preformating done. They get replaced - as you might have guessed when you load them via the netlist in PCBnew - by the appropriate info from EEschema.
Duh! 
Thanks!