What you read sounds right........a plane, any plane, needs a positive angle-of-attack to produce lift, which means the elevator has to be pushing down a little (either via a tiny bit of up elevator, or incidence). This is the ideal situation in most cases. OTOH, a finely balanced model with near-perfect CG will reduce the elevator-downforce requirement to almost nil, but will be kinda tricky to fly (which may be just fine for whatever sort of flying you're doing, like aerobatics). Some race planes have even used slight aft CG to offload some of the lifting requirement to the elevator/horizontal stabilizer, which purportedly helps reduce drag on some designs. Makes a sure 'nuff unstable airplane though.

With that said, I'd go with Jburry's advice and guesstimate that you have a little too much down-thrust. Try shimming some of it out. Then I'd go from there with CG (in other words, just move CG back a little at a time and see how you like it).