well i would guess that most people have a little trouble getting into 1st and reverse from a stop every now and then. When you get the new clutch make sure the shop visually checks out your tranny fluid and the tranny if they will to check for unnessary wear and tear.

Since you have trouble upshifting as well as down shifting it sounds really like your clutch isnt disengageing fully. Can you shift fine without using the clutch? If you lack the skills to downshift without the clutch, you should be able to upshift fine if you just go a tad slower on your upshifts. To do this:

while driving in 2nd gear (1st gear is just henious imo) when your ready to shift to third gear let off the gas slightly, pull the shifter into neutral and gently slide it up into third. If you do this in a fluid motion without letter the RPM's drop more than 1k (in a GSR atleast) then the tranny should pickup thrid gear just fine. (Remember your not using the clutch for this test) Continue shifting into 4th and 5th wihtout using the clutch. Let us know if you can do this. Key is to let the synchros do the work as your slowly shifting into the next higher gear. If your tranny is fine you should be able to do this easily. If you can do this test, but when you try to shift using the clutch it dosen't work it sounds like your clutch is shot.