It's more "by design" than junk steel. Ford was one of the first, in this country, to start that. Planned obsolescence with engineering designs that make a DYI person give the fuck up. THIS is how you create and keep jobs for an ever expanding population that always wants more and more and needs to pay for all them little critters they keep having with no thought to their future. It all goes way deeper than most consider and the end result of this kind of thinking is not good.
If you're lucky, you can pull the fuses on those stability control and anti-lock brake systems and put the driving back in your hands, like I did but you still need to keep regular checks of your check engine light to moniter the main engine, tranny and cooling systems. Manual "turn off" of these overrides don't always fully turn them off, so pulling fuses is your only option. Some of these newer cars/trucks won't allow even that.
Yea, many years ago, though I liked Chevy's engine designs much better, the Fords used better steel in their engine and posed a "few" fewer problems related to that but it hasn't been that way for decades, now. Vehicles have been made to keep the parts and service industry thriving for a long time, now. Like I said, it's all about jobs, the bottom line and maintaining those things over time. As long as we keep fuckin', they'll keep fuckin' shit up.
Near all of Ford's trannys during that time shifted funny and it was usually a programming problem than anything else. Unless I KNOW that the tranny fluid got hot/burned, I will not ever do a flush of one and likely not do the filter, either unless I suspect some serious wear problems. A flush will more often than not cause a complete failure due to moving wear particles around to places they don't need to be. Ford just had some funky trannies, is all. Bad designs. Chevy had a few, too, like the 700R series of trannies that sucked, too. They shifted fine but didn't last long, especially if used hard but were less expensive to repair/replace than many Fords. My old 94 Chevy truck has 217K on it and still burns clean on the plugs but has been through 3 trannies, already. I'm hearing a knocking sound underneath, now, that sounds like a torque converter bolt has come loose or the flywheel has cracked. If the flywheel breaks bad enough, it'll burn the tranny up. Hoping for a loose bolt as soon as I get a chance to see.