Reading more, driving more.
TRANS-X seems to have taken care of the 'kicking down the road' problem mostly.
Still have the shifting issue when turning. It'll go if I'm feather light on the throttle (dangerous when turning onto a main road), but even 1/4 throttle causes the slip, which is followed by a hard shift.
I loosened the bowden cable a little bit based on threads I searched, but it doesn't seem to have done much (I didn't turn it a whole bunch because it's not really the timing of the shift that's the problem).
I read this post about the ALDA affecting shifting:
ALDA Adjust and Hard Shifting
Should I move to the ALDA next?