My buddy has a 1996 Explorer with a 4R55E automatic transmission. With around 140k on it and shifting issues that required a full rebuild far less than 2k miles ago, it's back in the shop after we did a hall Mary fluid change yesterday.
See, it's throwing a code and failing to engage 4th gear, presumably due to a faulty solenoid, PCM, harness, gear goblin, or incorrect incantation and burnt offering combination being presented to the machine. Who the hell really knows? The reason I'm sharing this is because it seems like people have forgotten what the words "robust", "quality", or "good" can appropriately be used to describe.
When I read that the 4R55E is any of these things, it's quickly followed by a litany of caveats: "as long as the PCM/ECM don't fuck things up," "just make sure you fill it with distilled liquid gold, or Mobil 1 synthetic ATF," "leaving aside the phonebook-thick stack of service bulletin revisions that have to be made to make it operable," and so on.
Don't take this the wrong way - Ford is far from the only manufacturer that has this kind of thought surrounding a product they've brought to market. To bring this a little closer to home, we can look squarely at the Grand Cherokee and the electronically-controlled TorqueFlite that has been the source of many a pedal turned back and a dollar burned at the altar of Mopar, despite the TorqueFlite being an awesome automatic transmission platform. God knows I've put eagle's through hell, and it always has bounced back (clutch packs seized? Put that fucker in reverse and bash shit back in line!). The reason for this, though, is because it's hydraulically-controlled, not electronically-controlled. Eagle's transmission would've been toast long ago if it were one of the Jeep variants referred to above.
The technology at the heart of the A998 is all built on old, well-tested mechanical engineering principles of leveraging physical properties of fluids, abrasives, and gearing to perform a certain set of functions. Electronic controllers, while somewhat more mature now than what was used in 1996, are fragile, opaque, deeply abstract in operation, and better suited for use in iPods and throwaway consumer goods than in a machine that weighs a ton or more and is capable of moving fast enough to make an unidentifiable mess of man and raccoon alike. What's more, they often subvert the appropriate action of those mechanical components that they've been put in charge of.
The point of my meandering complaining here is not that "computer is bad" (though it really is), but that a system isn't worth shit when the subsystems and components it directly relies on in the performance of its functions are temperamental garbage. In other words, no, the 4R55E is not tough, robust, or even good, because all of the caveats that you tack on after are things that you can't take away and still have an operating transmission.
Hopefully I'll get old enough one day to actually warrant having hard-headed, anachronistic opinions.
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