Frond... that's, er, French cycle-speak for front.

Thanks for the suggestions, y'all. It feels more like there's just too much tension on a spring somewhere, rather than an cable issue, but I'll definitely investigate that angle, too.

The difficulty is pretty much on all shifts. And with a triple, you need to use the "trim" shift feature more than you would with a double. But because it takes so much pressure to shift at all, it's pretty difficult to do a trim-shift (going toward a smaller ring) without pushing so hard it does a full shift.