I talked with my dealer. She is confident my machine is good, but just to be sure she's having the long arm teacher and the machine tech come out to my house. We're going to load a quilt on my machine so the educator can adjust the tension herself to make sure the baseline is good. Then we will quilt a while on it so if the machine isn't working correctly, the tech can fix it while the educator is there to be sure it's quilting well. They did this with one other customer and apparently her machine needed a lot of adjusting, but she's been happy with it ever since.
I really like and respect my dealer and I'm glad they didn't just leave me hanging. I'm hesitantly hopeful. They are confident I'll be a happy quilter yet, so we will see!