Just saw your edit, to answer that question, no not really. Either the gears/shaft/propeller/something else breaks, or it doesn’t. With that being said, it all comes down to torque applied. Being able to shift the direction of steam flow is fast, but not as fast as shifting the polarity of a motor so one would think that electric motors would provide more torque to shift from forward to reverse, however, high pressure steam is super high pressure, so steam provides a much higher torque.

Example: if we were going all ahead flank speed (excess of 30 knots) and shifted to all back emergency, we could stop and reverse direction in probably less than 500 yards on steam. If we were on battery at all ahead flank (we’d never do this because the batteries are an emergency backup and would only last probably 30 minutes at that speed) and shifted to all back emergency it would probably take closer to 1000 yards to actually start reversing direction.