I have a strong suspicion that the reason points and time-boxing are so bad is that they're trying to weld two distinct processes together. Tickets are great;

I have a strong suspicion that the reason points and time-boxing are so bad is that they're trying to weld two distinct processes together. Tickets are great; they bound tasks, provide a clearinghouse for all relevant information on an issue, and help monitor and prioritize needed work. The instinct to turn the "what work exists at what priority?" tool into a "let's organize our work" tool is totally understandable given all that, but I think it's a serious mistake. Tickets define tasks, but their times are highly variable (timeboxing is ugly, storypointed "investigation" tickets are uglier) and they exclude a whole bunch of non-ticket work: communication, bureaucracy, unstructured inspection, and so on. If you make tickets the basic unit of scheduling, you're suddenly building "buffer" tickets and padding ticket durations to account for "something always comes up". It's Goodhart's law in action; your metric - storypoints - becomes a target and stops being an accurate metric.