LOL, what?
With a lease, you pay 3 things. Depreciation, finance rates, and pure dealer profit.
The main portion of the cost is the depreciation they expect. They tend to figure this out pretty damn well before they launch the vehicle, so it ends up that the buyout is damn near what the used value of the car is (in the case of this WK2, residuals were a little stronger than they expected it'd seem).
You do pay a little bit of financing charge, a lot of people don't realize that, but you do pay interest on it. Then there's just the pure profit they take in (in a lot of cases, that's the "money down" etc.)
In any case, I'm not entirely sure what "transmission issues" you're speaking of. Mine did have a bit of a judder when coasting uphill, but a flash to the PCM cleared that up without a hitch - but I have a V8, so maybe you're speaking of something else that is V6 related.
That all said, I'm not aware of any major rashes of failing transmissions. So I'm not really too sure what exactly there is to cure. If you're talking about the judder, my dealership was going to replace the torque converter, but the PCM flash ended up fixing it. If you're concerned about it making the transmission die, you could buy a badass extended warranty for less than the cost to upgrade to a '14 as well.
Leases are for a few types of people. Small business owners who can write them off, people who are trying to buy cars they can't really afford, people who just like having new things, and people who love making payments on cars forever.
If you're looking at other vehicles like the Jeep, the new 4Runner is great. I wanted a few luxury features it didn't offer though, so it wasn't a major contender for me, but its Lexus cousin was. I bemoaned the lack of a V8 in it as well, but their V6 is stout and returns slightly worse performance than our V8, with pretty impressive fuel economy. Plus, it's still body on frame and tough as nails.