“On some level an automatic in a CJ sounds wrong.
I might have seen one set up with an automatic transmission. All manuals for me.”
Having offroaded all my life I have found this depends on the terrain. For rock crawling I would rather have the standard so I can just crawl along solid. For soft sand I would rather have an automatic. A good compromise is having a low RPM lockup convertor in an automatic with a good shift kit.
Standards can be a pain when trying to shift up in soft sand. It is near impossible to shift fast enough to keep it from coming to a stop before you can get into the next gear. So you end up just going along in one gear without being able to upshift until you hit hard stuff again. But with an auto it will shift fast enough to actually get away with upshifting in the soft stuff.
Back then my boss was trapped in her house. I was the only person that made it to work on a super heavy snow day. Her husband gave up with his Ford 250 4x4 which surprised me.
Drove right over, picked her up then right back to work.
One icy you couldn’t even stand. Guy gave me $20-$50 to drive him 2 miles to his home. I really think it was $50. There was no way for him to get home. Went right up an icy hill past all these stuck cars. Piece of cake. The thing was amazing in that regard. I was going to buy a new body but sold it for house building cash.