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IIRC, what killed the original Hydramatic was the fact that there was one shift in it, I think 2-3, that had to actuate and release a whole bunch of clutches and stuff with the correct timing, and it was tricky for them to do. The Torqueflite and later stuff were 3 speeds, where every gear change was just a clutch or a band or two.
A lot of companies did weird stuff back then with automatics, probably to get around patents.
The common until now PRNDL was mandated by the feds with pushing from Nader, who seemed to think PNDLR was the source of all the world's problems (and console shifters - he wanted a ban on them, IIRC from his book). If course, I'm sure if the US auto industry at the time was already PRNDL, he'd have argued against it for something else.
Of course now that he crawled into whatever hole he came out of, cars have all sorts of bizzare shifters that 1/2 the world can't figure out...
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