I still think it's wrong to conflate the two, at the very least. Agile gives you principles as to how to envision developing software. Scrum is just one implem

I still think it's wrong to conflate the two, at the very least. Agile gives you principles as to how to envision developing software. Scrum is just one implementation that tries to follow these principles. I'm not a fan of Scrum, although I can understand why some of its components could be attractive. Velocity for example is interesting, as it's an attempt to empirically measure how "fast" a team can develop, and base estimations on that instead of just throwing a bunch of hours/days as an estimate when in fact it's hard to do that. I still think it doesn't work well to solve this, but to be fair I don't think there's a single method that solves it. In the end, I think Agile is beneficial (in my experience!) but more importantly that you need to use and tailor a software development methods to your own needs and context, and stop blindly following existing models but instead see them just as what they are: tools. As another example since you mentioned it: daily standups can be good, or terrible, it depends what you make of these. I've worked in a company where it was basically a "scheduled waste of time", but I moved to a place where we mixed it with basically a "hey good morning" type of coffee break and it worked rather well in a casual way, chatting up what was coming and that's it. And we keep in mind that if some kind of "ritual" becomes useless, then we skip it altogether as soon as we agree there's no value in it. That last part feels important to me because that's ultimately where a key aspect lie: when you say it's a "micromanagers' dream", I think it just shows that the software development method can always be twisted and hijacked by some people given enough power/representation/influence.