Ultimately, people need agreed upon terms for communicating planning and expectations. That's it. The more people are involved, the more complicated the proces

Ultimately, people need agreed upon terms for communicating planning and expectations. That's it. The more people are involved, the more complicated the process gets and all of these approaches evolve out of trying to find an agreeable and effective way of doing it so that everyone doesn't have to figure out a new solution every time. As much of a buzzword hell as it is, I really believe that Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the closest thing to the right balance of trade offs.