I must be missing something here, because the solution is simple. If you select a point with the direct selection tool (the white arrow) then the Reverse Path buttons in the Attributes palette work exactly as expected. Admittedly, it's a little counter-intuitive to affect an entire path by selecting a single point within it, but if you can wrap your head around that, it works just fine.
And don't get me started about the competition. Freehand was okay, but CorelDraw was and continues to be by far the best. Imagine everything that you do in a dialog box being done instead "live," right on the object, such as gradients, etc., which is why CorelDraw, like the metric system, is the standard everywhere else.