For rock crawling purposes I converted my previous '97 TJ (bought new and built in my garage) from its OE AX-15 5-speed to an automatic and when that well built Jeep was stolen, I bought a replacement '04 with the 42RLE so I'd have another automatic. Trust me, you can control the gear changes just fine. I regularly rock crawl locked in 1st gear, 4:1 4-Low, and 5.38 gears. If I want 2nd gear I shift to it. Not to mention automatic transmissions, via the magic of the torque converter, generate 2-3x more low-end torque than a manual transmission does which is awesome for rock crawling.
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