You can't listen to those things. The people with problems are going to want everyone to know about it, the people that are satisfied don't care. So you get all the people with problems giving bad reviews and everyone else doesn't say anything. You also have no idea how those people treated their cars.
The automatic is OK as long as you change the fluid every 20k-30k miles and it's best to add an external cooler.
Contours, especially duratecs, do have some quirks, but that's what this site is for. The quirks are nothing major and all the information to fix whatever happens is right here.
