I spoke to the "technician" at the hobby shop and he explained to me in alot of words that he has no idea what he's talking about but really didn't want me to know that. He started talking about subtrim on the transmitter and how I needed to relearn the set up. Maybe while I'm relearning he can start learning. The transmitter has no idea what the auto pilot is doing besides telling the plane what level of auto pilot to engage.

Would compass calibration have anything to do with it? I'm 99% sure at this point that messing with the transmitter is not going to fix it, because I can turn the transmitter off and the plane acts the same. The odds of this being a defect are pretty low. I'm an instruction manual reader but the planes documentation is lacking.