The rest transmission mount is kind of a pain 5o get to with the exhaust on the car, I would suggest at least loosening it. Basically you just have to lift up on the transmission just enough to support it and get the load off the mount. Depending on your climate the nuts that hold the mount to the transmission cross member might not be in the Best of condition. The engine essentially the same thing but just lifting one side up at a time.

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I can't speak about the motor mounts, but I did the trans mount while changing the driveshaft on my '09 2.5 4EAT. Did not have to disturb the exhaust, but mine is missing almost every heat shield so maybe that helped. Did not have to disconnect the pitch stop link in the engine bay either, I was able to lift the trans enough to get the mount out. Not having the driveshaft in the way certainly helped visibility of course, but not sure if it really did much for access. I suspect the driveshaft center support is soft enough to absorb the lift from the tranny, but maybe not so you should keep an eye on it. I think the hardest part was reaching the forward mount-to-tranny bolts, but even that wasn't too bad - normal tools worked.

A while back there was a long thread in here about the castellated rubber "snubber" washer on the mount-to-crossmember bolt and what the snubber-to-crossmember gap should look like, so I included before-and-after pix of that. Bottom line, the new mount doesn't sag as much under the weight, so the gap is smaller but still there. The snubber is there to counter the driveline torque coming from the front wheels when you're in reverse (which wants to rotate the top of the engine away from the firewall and lift the tail of the tranny up). That way the snubber bolt takes the brunt of the load in reverse instead of stretching out the mount blocks.

 

...and to Kwinabyte's point about loosening the exhaust - I thought about loosening the spring-loaded joint between the front and rear sections, but decided not to because I didn't have any replacement gaskets and didn't want to allow extra movement there while lifting the tranny. I wasn't sure if the gasket in there would survive. So maybe have a gasket on hand if you're going to loosen that joint.

 

Many thanks for the info and the photos! I ordered the "snubber" and will change that, too.