Messed-up 30A… help with diagnosis?

Okay, this happened earlier in the summer but I was too embarassed and ashamed of myself to ask for help here, mostly because it was my frustration/bad temper/stupidity that caused this issue.

After I thought I had my clutch issues sorted out, I tried to drive home from washing Zoey and the clutch pedal suddenly had almost no pressure. Stupidly, I thought I could limp her home. In retrospect, I should've left her there and come back with the tools I needed to bleed the clutch hydraulics again. Anyway, once I got onto the street, clutch pedal pressure went from little to none, but since I was already moving, I thought that if I drove carefully and matched revs to shift, I'd be alright. I had to stop at a red light though, and getting her rolling required a pretty heavy hand on the shifter to get her in gear. I managed to get home and into the garage, and I got a more mechanically-inclined buddy to give me a hand in bleeding the system properly. Once we got the clutch working normally again, I tried to go for a drive and realized the shifter was really loose and sloppy. It took several tries to get into reverse; same deal with first and second gear. Third gear I could barely find, and fourth/fifth not at all. The shifter moves around A LOT and obviously doesn't feel notchy like it's supposed to. My buddy was going to remove the shifter plate to see if anything obvious was broken, but we didn't have the right tools on hand so we called it a day.

I was on a forced vacation from work for the last two months, and I promised myself I wouldn't spend any more money on Zoey until I was working again. I'm back up north now on a new project (better money and less QC work!) and suffering from pretty debilitating Z31 withdrawl, so I figured I'd describe the issue and see if it sounds familiar to anyone. My buddy thinks the tranny is shot and that the synchros are broken; that's why it has trouble shifting into the lower gears. The thing is though, I can't shift into the upper gears AT ALL (even when the engine isn't running) and there's no problem shifting into the lower gears once I wiggle the stick around enough to actually find the gear I'm looking for. I didn't force the tranny into any gear other than 1st, so I was wondering why reverse and second would also be affected. I don't know enough about transmissions to know for sure, but based on the symptoms I didn't think the diagnosis made sense.

Could it just be something as simple as the shifter linkage?

When they finally let me go home (16 more days!) I'm going to buy the tools I need to take the shifter off and see if there's anything obvious broken. If anyone has any suggestions to help me diagnose the issue or ideas on what specifically could be wrong, then I'd sure appreciate the feedback. I'll replace the tranny if I have to, but if I don't have to that'd sure save me a lot of time and trouble. Plus if all I have to do is replace the shifter, it's a decent excuse to buy a short throw kit.

Thanks in advance. Now maybe I'll actually be able to get some sleep.