I've got to agree wholeheartedly with this. It's a roll of the dice. As a firefighter/ rescue technician I've been to plenty of car wrecks on our busy beltline highway. On 2 occasions my ladder truck ran calls where a driver's life was saved by the EMERGENCY brake. One call I went to, the other was about a week later on a different shift.
It's not a parking brake, that's just what it's commonly used for. It's an emergency mechanical back up in the event of hydraulic system failure.
I'd seriously recommend you bite the bullet and just deal with the headache of fixing it. Likely, the reason for your issues is that you never used it for parking. By using it for a parking brake, you exercise the mechanism to prevent corrosion and other issue due to non-use (and as a side benefit, reduce stress on the transmission components). It's not a flawed design...
Same thing happened to me with an E-brake on an F150. It froze one day when I decided to use it (I never used them before that). I can sympathize with ratty E-brakes. My next truck was a newer F150, had that for 100k miles (including 6 years of NC winter where salt brine is used on the roads, and they'll put out salt in a skinny minute if they think there might be snow). Anyway, I used the E-brake all the time and never once had the inkling of an issue. Same with my 'Runner.
Lastly, remember Murphy, once you take that thing out, you'll probably have a situation you'll want to use it, maybe (hopefully not) NEED it....
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