when generating surfaces from curves its often hard to predict surface orientation. subsequent flipping destroys history, so that is no option either.
very often i find myself struggling around with the direction of the input curves or the pick order, but until now i could not figure out a logic to predict u and v and, most important, the normal direction of the resulting surface. if i am missing something here, i would be happy to be helped and illuminated.
as a solution i would suggest to add the directions tripod to the preview and add buttons for “flip normals”, “flip u”, “flip v” and “swap uv” to the dialog boxes. the network surface command particularly would benefit a lot from this, and for most of the other surface commands it would be a nice improvement as well.