What follows is NOT saying that the OP's fitter does not know what their doing, your right though that the OP needs to go back and discuss why he was given 38 bars. What follows has been the experience that I've seen over 40 years of cycling, my experiences may not be like those of others, if you live in area considered to be a mecca for cycling chances are you'll find a good fitter, but if you don't chances are you won't find a good fitter.

Most of what you've written is correct till you came to that statement. Just because they trained some college student on the Retul system, or Serrota system or whatever system does not make them experts. I've known roughly about 45 to 50% of all cyclists that I knew or heard about actually came out worse then they did going in, in addition to spending money for the fitting and more money on accessories the rep recommended. The assumption is that the fitter your dealing with actually does know what their doing and thus experts, but that fails to be true many time. The best thing to do is to get a recommendation for a fitter from a cycling race club, especially if you live in a city where there is more then one fitter available. Where I live there is only one fitter, and the people that I've known or heard about had about a 50% chance of coming out better.

One guy I know went in due to some discomfort and spent over $800 after the first fitting went wrong when a new accessory recommended didn't work, so the fitter not wanting to blame the new accessory put him back on the fitting machine claimed another accessory was needed to make the first one work right. Again failure, goes back in told yet another accessory was needed to get the previous two to work right. By this time my friend was getting a bit leery but bought the third accessory, it to failed. He was worse off then he was going in, so he went back to his original stuff and settings and all went back to his normal discomfort. The LBS didn't charge him for his 2nd and 3rd use of the fitting machine and his labor, but the accessories and the initial fitting charge came to just over $800.

You have to realize too that a marketing rep for a fitting system does not go into the store selling the idea of making people happy and fitted on their bike; no, the sales tactic is that by having a fitting machine and a fitter will bring in additional profits in the form of accessory sales. And the LBS fitter/sales person will do his best to sell you the more expensive accessories rather then a lower costing ones that could work just as well.

So just because a fitting is expensive doesn't mean the fitter is an expert 100% of the time, and that's where I took exception to what you said.

Just my 2 cents.