I have recently switched to KICAD 8
I’m having a weird phenomena where the footprints won’t show up in the PCB editor.
You can see the ratsnest going to the part, and you can click on the part where should be and select it, but I can’t get it to show up.
I blew away the PCB and restarted it and that got me going. now I am changing footprints and it is happening on individual parts. Don’t want to lose my work, but can’t seem to figure out how to get them to show. I have updated footprint to no avail.
Till 1/2 of your text I thought about some setting in Appearance-Objects and I found “Footprint Front” and “Footprint Back”. But the second 1/2 of your post looks being against it.
Next thought - may be it is some problem in 8.0.5 that was fixed in 8.0.6…
It’s fixed in nightlies but it doesn’t seem like the fix will be backported to an 8.0.x version.
You can work around it by restarting KiCad. It is a display issue and not a design issue, so you can save your work without fear of baking the issue into your board or anything like that.