Tinkered with the bike this morning. I backed off the inside limit screw quite a bit (there is a chain watcher in place, so hopefully throwing the chain of on the inside is not a concern)

Also took up cable slack since the cable may have stretched since I installed it new this winter.

It's not intuitive to me why these would help since (provided you're not at the inner limit) the downshifting power in the FD comes from the spring, not the cable.

But I'd like to be wrong - I'll ride it to work as soon as we have a day w/o rain in the forecast - we'll see!