It may have saved me some time until my shop gets built, that's what I was sincerely hoping for. Just bought a house so ALL of my saved money was put in to the down. Had to take out a loan, through the transmission shop, to cover it but I need to sell the X now because the type of house loan I'm getting won't accept my overtime hours (12 hour shifts at work, so 4 hours OT every day) because I haven't been there for two years - only a year and a half. That puts my debt to income ratio completely out of line.
I took it to a local transmission shop that gets work from other reputable automotive shops around here that don't do their own transmission work. Cottman Transmission. Total cost was $5k for all new parts in the old case. They said it's what they see 9 times out of 10 with the ZFs that have failing torque converters. It's a domino effect.
I would say about the only warning before the failure was that the shuddering started to come back in sport mode, just barely. It was two weeks before the transmission failed and I believe it shuddered twice. I took it camping Memorial Day weekend and it must have been the drive that did it in. Lots of enthusiastic driving up the twisties and it performed great. Two days later it died with no warning.