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A few more comments: A "Ford Dealer" is not Ford, and certainly not Ford Engineering. Of course Ford isn't perfect, but we shouldn't transfer distrust for a lousy dealer to Ford. You could change the transmission fluid every 10k miles and it would have no effect on whether your transmission fails (as we are discussing). It has nothing to do with "normal wear" and nothing to do with the bearings. The failure appears to happen as a catastrophic, abrupt event where a ring (I suspect it is friction fit) on the transfer shaft slips which then allows the shaft to shift back and forth allowing gears to hit each other or rub against the housing. In my case the corners of all teeth on one gear were sheared off, groves were worn in the housing (as pictured by Ford) and the end of the shaft eventually wore a hole through the housing. The bearings were still amazingly good. This problem has nothing to do with the prior condition of the fluid. What we feel good about doing is often based on what we've heard and how we interpret it, not engineering data. Personally, anyone can change fluid as they like, but for other folks reading this forum, we shouldn't suggest that deviating from the published schedule is recommended or will provide longer life.

Update on my issue: after having the car for a day and a half, service manager contacted me. It looks like the sound I heard was indeed the bearing/transfer shaft issue and they're replacing the entire transmission under warranty! It appears that being under 8 years/100,000 miles with the extended coverage on the Energi was what made the difference. It should be replaced with the current (mid 2015 and later) HF35 transmission. Should take about a week to get the part and get it installed. In retrospect, getting the first gen (2013 MY) of this new transmission was a risk, but I knew it wasn't an entirely new design, just an evolution of the earlier design so I thought I'd be good. I vaguely remember the extended plug in hybrid warranty powertrain coverage being an incentive to buy, and it looks like I wasn't wrong. This service experience makes me more likely to look at a new Mach-E as my next car, I'll tell you that . . . definitely heard from Tesla owners that the service experience is awful.