I would be too scared to risk it, are the next gen RS6's too expensive?
As I sat at MRC chatting to another customer with a RS6 in there having gearbox work done, his comment was those gearboxes are made of cheese
I guess he was having a lot of problems with it.
On the other hand, with the RS6 a manual swap is a real possibility. All factory parts exist including the pedal box from a manual UK A6, and the only major stumbling blocks are custom adaptor for 01E gearbox has to be machined, and ECU has to be professionally re-mapped to ignore that it no longer has to listen to the auto box TCU.
TDI 01E's (the strong ones) are cheaply available in the UK, I got one last year for only £200 just to pinch it's 6th gear, it looked very clean inside.