Add inadequate design and it's a kluge. Look at the oil flow area around the trans thermostat and compare to the pipe. It's a restrictive orifice even when it hasn't failed.
And yes I am a degreed engineer
So wouldn't the correct solution be to take the design their engineers produced and un-count some beans to increase flow or increase peak cooling capacity?
Putting these parts in there wasn't a cost saving measure, maybe they made the parts as cheap as they possibly could but the cheapest part is no part and they clearly decided it needed a part. They wouldn't have spent the money putting these things on the truck as a joke to make it wear out faster.
I see this stuff in forums all the time, like my wife has an old V6 Mustang and from the ~98 model year to the ~02 model year they added
50 horsepower to those cars by putting different heads on, extremely heavy and expensive cast aluminum dual runner intake manifolds with electrically operated valves on the short runners, and they use the same MAF and air filter as the much more powerful V8 version of the car. Then people get on forums and say they're gonna make tons of power with an aftermarket air filter.
Well shucks man I'm glad ebay seller SpeedyStuff1234 came along with that one size fits all cone air filter too bad Ford didn't have him on staff they could have saved a fortune on engineering and inventorying those new heads and manifolds and runner servos..
I'm not suggesting that modifying a vehicle is always pointless, we all modify ours to do what we need them to accomplish but that's not the same thing. When you raise the ride height for example you know you're trading a little fuel efficiency for a little ground clearance, you're shifting the priorities on trade-offs that are necessary. When you just remove a part the manufacturer spent money on engineering and installing, and you don't get anything from removing it except some imaginary and unproven guesses about distant future reliability.. I just don't get it and probably never will.