I've got a '97 Freightliner FL106 with a Series 50 Detroit and a MD3060P Allison. I do alot of both city, and highway driving and the only time I have a problem with mine doing the up and down shifting is on a highway with alot of hills, with the cruise control set. The rest of the time it shifts up and down pretty much like I'd be doing it myself if it was a manual. That said, being a service truck I run at what would basically be considered fully loaded all the time. As such the engine is always pulling and rarely idling along like it would with a lighter weight truck.
As far as the trucks your talking about, and it being hard on the transmission, it sounds to me like their transmissions are doing exxactly what they are designed to do. By that I mean they are keeping the engine running in it's 'sweet spot' to enable them to get the best fuel mileage possible. Although you can't really tell it every automatic transmission, regardless of it's application is doing the same thing. The difference between the trucks and the cars is with the trucks the sweet spot is usually alot smaller than the cars, and with the size of the vehicles/engines/transmissions/loads involved, it's alot easier to tell that there is a shift going on than it is with a smaller vehicle because you can really hear the change in tone of the engine as it revs or slows down.
As far as effecting the life expectancy, my truck had nearly 450,000 miles on it when the transmission went out. In my case the only reason it went out was a leak in the oil cooler put antifreeze in the transmission oil. Unfortunately ethalene glycol mixed with the the oil will cause the fiber on the clutch discs to release from their metal backing plates. Even at that, I changed the cooler, flushed the system and refilled it with fresh transmission fluid. At the time I did that instead of going ahead and getting it rebuilt like everyone told me to do because I was too busy to take the truck down for a week. I wound up making it another year before I finally had to go into the transmission and get it rebuilt.
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