I'll preface this by saying that I'm not an audio guy. I'm a video guy.

I have a scene in my feature that has pretty unbearable audio. This is probably because we had to record it through 3 converters (to get from XLR to minijack). You can barely understand what's being said and the sound is very hollow and scratchy. I would MUCHO prefer not to loop it. Any suggestions? My audio guy told me he worked with it, but it sounds worse then ever (so he's fired and I'm doing it myself)

If it's that bad, I very much doubt you can fix it. Bad audio is bad audio, and the old rule of garbage in, garbage out always applies.

Oh damn I feel your pain! I did a short that ended up with audio that sounded like we shot the scene in a russian submarine. I know you're avoiding the dreaded ADR but when I hulked up and did ADR to replace the bad sound it came out so much better than the rest of the short! In the end it was worth it.

But there are a few sound guys trolling around here so maybe if you posted a snippet they could download it and see what can be done.

Anyway good luck!