Transmission repair kind of an open ended thing.
I have been fortunate in that I do not have a lot of experience with paying for transmission repairs. Over the past 30 years, I have had to deal with a few of them on GM products however.
I was fortunate in that I had a shop that I trusted; hence the repair philosophy was tear it down, see what it needs, and if it is not too bad, fix it. In all cases, (about a half a dozen), the problems were fixed for less than the initial estimates. Basically a tranny repair seems to be a judgement thing as to what is good and what should be replaced.
The torque converter, at least as far as my repair shop was concerned, was a sealed unit, and it was either a replace, or don't touch, sort of approach; the rest of the tranny repair was "we will keep this and replace that". I do recall one time them asking me how the minnows got in after I had taken the pickup swimming one weekend.
The only repair that annoyed me was on my Buick Roadmaster where the torque converter had to be replaced. It did not actually quit until after the GM new car warranty had expired. I knew there was a problem but could never duplicate it at the dealership - there was only one hill in Alberta about 200 miles away where it would shutter - that was until after the warranty expired and then everyone seemed to remember that my tranny was the one with the weak converter and it should be replaced with the upgraded one. It was, at my expense.