WOW... to listen to some of your guys it's surprising we EVER got any field work done using our gear drive farm tractors! How on earth did we ever find enough hands and feet to down-shift the Torque-Amplifier, steer the tractor, and raise/lower whatever implement we were pulling/using. And GOSH... we even used a Gear Drive tractor on the loader! How did we EVER survive?!?! The addition of the M&W live hyd on the M really improved loader performance, and was also standard on the Super H, Super M-TA & 450. BIG improvement over the non-live belly pump on the older straight M's & H's.
DON T. - Yes, I spent a couple summers hauling ready-mix cement in trucks with a 5+4 transmission. The trucks were old, way too much play in the steering so I never used the arm-through the wheel and shifted both main & aux. box at the same time, always shifted one, then the other box/lever. The mixer trucks had a little more HP than an IH 345 gas V8, but not much more, most of those old mixers had 165 HP Cummins 6's, two had 185's, same engine with a turbo. Loaded they grossed just over 50,000#, their licensed maximum weight, but the mixers could hold an extra yard or two of concrete, so they could weigh close to 60,000# if they wanted to. Yep, some hills were steep enough you lost speed going up them so fast you couldn't drop gears fast enough.
I did drive a feed truck for a week or so one X-mas break, BULK feed, no bags. Not near as much work to unload.