First car I ever drove was a manual. First car I ever bought was a manual. First diesel truck I had was a manual. I have always had at least one vehicle with a manual all my driving years.

I wouldn't get a manual in my truck for anything. Modern auto transmissions are AWESOME! I have a manual in my hotrod for a little variety, but even that trans is highly customized to work well and frankly just to live.

No. If you're converting put a ZF6 behind a Cummins. The NV5600s are heavy, clunky, and mechanically unsound. First gear and reverse gear shield the rear main bearing from oil on those transmissions unless you modify the gears to pump oil through. The easy fix is to overfill by two quarts, but that drags down efficiency. They also have reverse on the wrong side. On a truck it should always be IN & UP. To allow for easy rocking between the lowest gear and a numerically similar reverse.

ZF6s are few and far between unless cheap bay has them. Not sure how running the cooling system will be on it since don't they connect with the radiator or do they run their own cooler upfront? Cause I still may yet do a Cummins swap and I would like to have a manual with it, rather than dink around with controllers and would like to teach my ol lady how to drive a manual just cause.

I second that. Back in the good old days, when rangers (were still available), 4x2 V6 F-150's and super duty's still had sticks, I would sometimes go to the Ford website, and build a truck exactly the way I wanted it, and think that one day (i was a teen then), that I would go to their website, order a truck exactly the way I wanted it, and go pick it up from the local Ford dealership.

These days, I am an adult and work at a Ford dealership, and could pick up a brand new truck at a price better then what 99% of the people here could get one for...but as it is today, there is nothing new on the lot that I would buy.

And if lack of a stick isnt a big enough turn-off, just look at the price of these new trucks. At my dealership, the 2015 F-150's are about $55K, but if you want to "upgrade" (AKA pay way more then all the extra ***** they add to it) to an FTX/Black Ops edition, then you are looking at around $80K, $25K more for a lift, fancy tires, and leather seats, oh and dont forget the fancy plastic and FAKE air scoops on the hood which only make tight turns harder as they block your view around the hood.

My ranger has 210K+ miles on it and needs work, my F-250 is 31 years old, has 250K+ miles, and needs a frame-off restoration, and my 83 F-150 just sits in the back of our dealership because I bought it on impulse and dont really have the time or money to work on it with the two other trucks I have, but that is fine with me, if one truck *****s out on me, I can use the other until the first is fixed. And that is unfortunately what we will have to do if we still want to drive a truck with a stick, buy an older one and learn how to fix everything on it. Which would you rather work on, a 6.9 IDI or a 6.7 PSD?

Interesting choice for the model name, in that you'd have to have a "black budget" to afford one. Shoot, that's more than we paid for our house....

A 6.7PSD any day of the week....

Not 100% accurate. Ram trucks in the 2500/3500 still offer the Cummins 6.7L with the G56 6 speed manual transmission, you just won't get getting the 865lb/ft of torque instead its 660. You can varify it yourselves for ram trucks. Least its still an option in the 2015 MY maybe 2016.

You can find ZF6s all over the place. Both GM and Ford used them in their pickups.
You can likely make up cooler lines for any radiator with a transmission cooler and get by. If you need something else, an external cooler would work, too.

...also, you can always find them somewhere... ZF Friedrichshafen - ZF Friedrichshafen AG

Black Ops edition is a customized truck by Tuscany, the hood scoops look "cheesy" and they way overcharge for the lift, tires, etc....

I've heard never get the GM version of the ZF6 because they did something odd to them that made them not work as well as the Ford versions. Just comparing here hows the old ZF5 to the newer ZF6? Shifting wise and how they are overall?

The Ford and GM versions are the same transmission, but spline differences and bell housings make them incompatible. If you are customizing... pick the easier one.

I've never driven a ZF5.

Muncie 4 spd. <- 197x C10
T98 <- Jeep
NV4500 <- 5 speed New Venture in a 2002 GM
ZF6 <- Multiple Fords. V8, V10, 7.3, 6.0
M62 <- Yep, 3 on the tree

...I thought this list was going to be shorter... There are other Jeeps, a Festiva... just too many.

Now have about 150 miles on our new XLT (supercrew/6-1/2' box), and have driven it on a pretty wide mix of roads and conditions.

Part of one of our town/home routes brings us up a mountain road from ~~ 400' elevation to ~~ 2400' elevation over about 6 miles. It is windy, and the speed limit is 30-35 (some places 15).

Overall, the auto-magic did pretty well; especially around town and on the freeway. However, coming up the mountain road, the auto-magic lost its gusto. It wanted to keep up-shifting to 4, and then dropping to 3 or 2 when the steepness went up. In effect, it was "hunting" and it didn't do so well. I found that as I tried to compensate for the increasing steepness of the road, that it would have to suddenly downshift, and we ended up "surging" until I had to back off the throttle. No fun.

So I switched to manual mode, and it did much better with me just holding it in 3rd, except for the flatter straight aways. No more surges, and overall a much smoother experience.

YMMV.

The company I drive for has those very same Volvo iShifts you speak of, and they are complete crap in the hills, let alone the mountains. I refuse to drive them since the Freightliner with a 10 speed manual that I now normally drive will pull the same hills with more weight at double the speed, even though it has 100hp less. I also call crap on the autos getting better mpgs, as i get better fuel economy in my old truck than the brand new Volvo trucks. 6.8 mpg vs 7.5 normally, though I am sitting at 8.2 so far for this week.

You're comparing a lot of oddity here. The old trucks are not like the new trucks, no matter what you're comparing, it doesn't work. There is no physical reason why the automatic cannot pull the hill as well as (or typically better than) the manual. You're probably looking at a rear end difference, or a governance issue. Torque curve is important, especially since you're comparing new vs old on top of different company's engines. Governance can get in the way of this torque curve, plus the engines could have different torque curves.
Your old truck will best your new truck. It's called emissions equipment, and you should know all about it. It's the same reason why we can't get a 6.4L scorpion to out mpg an old well built 7.3L. For awhile now, diesels have only been trying to get back to the MPG they used to have. Drive a 2015 manual against the same 2015 automatic and you'll see what I'm taking about.

I prefer to do all the thinking myself when driving and not some mindless computer that "thinks" it knows better than what I know that I need.
That is why I prefer a manual transmission in a truck. I use a truck as a tool to perform work and I will do the work the way I want to do it.