Need help with rotor phasing

Hang on
The kick-back on cranking may in fact be firing to the wrong cylinder.
But check out what OP says; He set the balancer to 44*BTDC for some reason.
That is not right.
Set the balancer to whatever your initial is set to. Then check the positions of the reluctor and rotor.
The reluctor should be just leaving the Magnetic pick up in the normal direction of rotation, and the rotor should be very close to right under the tower that fires #1 plug. It can be up to nearly 22.5* either way away from *1 tower, before it will fire the wrong tower, at below about 1000 rpm, or before whenever the flyweights begin moving.
Your job is to ensure that when the flyweights start advancing the timing cam, that the rotor is marching towards the #1 tower, to ensure the spark is traveling a shorter and shorter path, as the rpm increases.
Some engines may in fact march the rotor past the tower with increasing rpm and that is ok too. It can continue for quite a ways on a teener for instance.
So again, you have to make sure that as the rpm increases, that the rotor does not march too far. This would be highly unusual. This is why the rotor tip is about 1/4 inch wide, so the coil won't kill itself trying to fire these sometimes wide gaps