I don't think this is a viable solution to Agile. I think the spirit is fine in that its painfully obvious that Agile has become little more then a buzzword sol

I don't think this is a viable solution to Agile. I think the spirit is fine in that its painfully obvious that Agile has become little more then a buzzword sold by consultants, and almost all implementations of it look a lot like mini-waterfall then anything truly agile, but this misses the biggest faults in current agile implementations 1. It still puts process over people, you can never have an agile workflow that has ordained gatekeepers, in this case the separation of "project leads and stakeholders" from "developers" is going to lead to the same class of sprint problems you have in any implementation today. The people you need are the one's doing the work ( every single one of them, from the most junior to the most senior ) to sit down with the people 2. The lack of agility in scoping work in sprint means this is just a three week waterfall rather then a two week waterfall. You can't call any process agile that doesn't allow you to change direction at any point in time, hence the word agile. In traditional agile this is supposed to be a terminated sprint, but for reasons this is almost never done. 3. The baked in rest week will just make people unhappy. Teams are at their best when they are working together and making progress, that rest week will foment dissent within the team, especially since the "stakeholders" still have tasking to be done that week.