Well, I'll probably be flamed and ridiculed for this here for going against Toyota but not changing ATF is hogwash.
These are the same people who advise oil changed every 10k after all. Its not always an engineering issue.
The degradation timer/counter is probably there to increase service life by managing the shifting etc through known and tested ATF life spans and whatever cooked fluids do to that and the internals. Im sure they are doing a bang up engineering job of that and i don't expect the trans to blow up if you don't replace fluid but what i do know is that it wont hurt unless you are way out there, and even in that instance, the ability to "reset" the state of the fluid to the computer should fix the issues a late fluid change would induce.
Otherwise, when you rebuild it or swap it for actual failures, you would probably need to replace the ECT board too right? If it is indeed computer controlled and adjusted for.