I agree with you, and under ideal circumstances, I would be trying a bike before I bought it. This is my first frame only purchase, and I'm trying to get a ballpark sense of whether or not the frame size is worth buying. I understand that I'm not going to know for sure until I've spent the money and built the bike up, but there should be a general "rule of thumb" that I can follow here. And it seems, in general, that the 57cm "should" be OK with some tweaking.

Thanks again.