I am curious about programming these. Does this take hours of programming, driving, reprogramming, driving, swearing, etc. or is it pretty quick?
Depends on how picky you are about shift points. There are pre-made base tunes. A few minutes to adjust basic stuff (full throttle shift points) and it works.
An example of fine tuning. Driving a road with traffic I would be just below the next shift point. Thought to myself this would be so much better if it would just shift 1-2 MPH sooner. Pulled into a parking lot. Got that upshift line. Bumped a single point a number or two. Now it drove that road better. Wasn't needed, but was wanted. And was easy and could be done.
Basic tuning is fairly easy as well. Give a throttle setting, say 10%. Hold that throttle and think about the shifts. Too soon, too late? Go into the table, and move the 10% shift points to what you like. Smooth out the lines. Do again at differet throttle settings.
The more of a stick shift driver you are, the more you can set the shift points to what you want. You can do downshift points as well. Downshifts too soon, move that line to force a deeper throttle to downshift. Or go the other way and have it drop sooner if that is what is needed.
But it all starts with a base tune. And those are included.