The mechanic came by on Thursday and tried to fix the frame for me, but it didn't work. He said something about how the drive side stay was out of position by 5 mm and he was able to get it back close to where it was supposed to be left to right, but that it was also off positionally in another dimension - up and down? forward or back? I'm not sure. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I trust him because he has been super thorough the entire time. I didn't have time to chat with him about it cause i was in the middle of a meeting. He measured the frame for me before he started working on it and then again after, and it was clearly much better than it was before.
BUUUUT: the shifting is still not right. It's better, but not good yet.
When I try to ride without my hands on the handle bars, it's 'easier', but it still doesn't quite work. Before it was impossible to do it even for a fraction of a second - it would start pulling very quickly- now it doesn't seem to do it quite as fast - but it still does it. I confirmed that I can actually ride w/o hands by taking my road bike out for 15 minutes just to prove to myself that it's not a problem with me (and it's not).
So I don't know what to do. He suggested I take it to either a frame builder and ask them to take a look at it (chris dekerf lives pretty close) or take it to a bike shop that he knows has more experience bending bikes back into shape. I called the bike shop and they said they have done it on rare occasions before for old steel bikes that held a lot of sentimental value to someone, but they weren't really comfortable doing it in this case. They suggested I call a different bike shop and see what they say - but they did tell me that if I'm having these sorts of issues and it is frame related, it's probably a frame-builder problem to solve rather than a bike mechanic problem to solve.
I contacted Jamis and it turns out they have one frame left in the year my bike was made. They are going to figure out how much it's worth and email me a price on Monday,