The truck sold the day before I got here. I'm back to looking; I've seen a few prospects w/o 4WD, but not even many of those. This is Texas, dammit, there ought to be lots of used trucks available.
I think folks with standard cab long box pickups just don't sell them, they drive them until nothing is left. I have seen a few 2019 and 2020 models selling for more than a new 2021 special-order "work truck" would cost. Don't know what's up with that. Maybe the wait time for new special order trucks is more over a year because of the chip shortage, so anything actually on the lot sells for a premium.
I did a VIN lookup on that Ford F250 and it had the 2-valve version of the 5.4L V8. From what I can tell, most of the expensive problems came with the 3-valve version with variable valve timing. Those were put in F-250s starting in 2005; this was a 2004. I don't know if the 2-valve engines had trouble with broken sparkplugs or not, what I've read implies that was a 3-valve problem but never comes out and states it as fact.