As I just said in another post, the bike, its type and/or its frame size are really irrelevant to comfort because just about anything can be fixed by getting a different length of stem and/or a different reach of handlebar. There are even zero offset stems with no reach at all! I raised the bars on my flat-bar road bike until they were almost 2" above seat height and still had hand pain. Even with Ergon grips. You could change to drops and your hand pain will go away for good. I'm serious. But its not always an easy conversion. If you must stay with flat bars, in addition to raising the height, you have to bring the bars back to your riding position. North Road bars do this very well, but so do short stems under 80mm of length. A shorter top tube will do the same thing but I haven't always found that the smaller bike has the shorter top tube!
H