This is exactly the source of my frustration as well. I'm naturally inclined towards iterative development, frequent steering, and interacting with the people t

This is exactly the source of my frustration as well. I'm naturally inclined towards iterative development, frequent steering, and interacting with the people that will actually use the stuff that I'm building. I believe in those aspects of the agile mindset. What has worn me down over the past few years is the constant refrain that we are "behind" and "don't have time" for a lot of things that appear to me to be essential. We've been in a mode where we don't really have time to explore options. And once we've made a decision, we rarely revisit it even as information changes. I don't think this has anything to do with agile per se. One could argue that it's Scrum's fault, but even then I don't think you can lay the blame directly there. The point of sprints is to create frequent steering points. As new information comes up, let's make sure that we're still pursuing the correct course. But sprints can easily be misunderstood to be frequent deadlines that must be hit. There's some value there, but I think that misses the mark somewhat. I think a lot of it stems from a conflict of personality styles. From what I've seen, some people like the treadmill - it gives them direction, purpose, and energy. But for somebody like me, that treadmill is more of a grindstone.