I find this all very interesting and can see everyone's points. We try to use agile/scrum at my company or rather one of our divisions does. The division I work for runs the QA testing cloud for the applications development division. Arcana, you stated in a previous post that developers can become timid when an org tries to do agile/scrum but they end up trying to still manage top down. The application division does just that. However, in my experience, the devs aren't becoming timid, they are becoming bolder. And when they don't get what they want, they go crying to their managers claiming we are slowing them down. What I do find is their ideas and almost always their attempt to design infrastructure almost always fails. I also find they are highly resistant to documenting requirements often preferring to tell us how to do our jobs. They code. We manage infrastructure.
And lastly I'll say this. I find that many devs are experts at teaching computers to do tasks, ie they know C, C++, C#, Java, etc. really well. But, they are not experts at actually doing the tasks, ex. writing an encryption algorithm. I also find that many devs want to design the tools they use not understanding that tool development is not their core business.
That, of course, is my opinion based on what I've observed over the last 45 years of my life. Each of us has a unique set of experiences and may have different, even opposing opinions.
The one thing I know I can say we all share is the feelings and thoughts of our beloved city, our community, and what we built within City of Heroes/Villains.
LV