King of 200!ikr. I saw a picture of a piece of a 9 speed transmission, and it was a maze of channels and just ridiculously complex.
You were looking at the valve body. There's two kinds of valve bodies, Manual and fully automatic. A manual valve body requires you to move the transmission into each gear manually, but does not require a clutch to be operated. A fully automatic valve body is what most cars have nowadays. No shifting required, except to go into Park, Drive, Neutral, and Reverse. Now the way the valve body works, is the transmission fluid is pushed through different passages at different pressures to shift the car into each gear. For example, say you're going 40 mph. You then floor the car. Transmission fluid will be forced into the passages That involve whatever gear the car's computer is programmed to downshift into at that speed, Causing the transmission to downshift.