No, they work as designed. The question is: who really designed them? If Agile actually empowered workers, management would ban it. Management took the relative

No, they work as designed. The question is: who really designed them? If Agile actually empowered workers, management would ban it. Management took the relatively sensible directives of "the Agile Manifesto" and turned it into a vehicle through which they could shove Taylorism down everyone's throat. It's a status meeting. It's not supposed to be, but status meetings are good for managers and bad for workers and so they're not going anywhere. Capitalism would be bad enough if managers actually did care about "the company" or their shareholders, but it's simpler and more degenerate than that. They are optimizing for their own careers. It isn't more complex than that. The "bureaucratic culture of fear" suits them well. The weaponized standup is great for them; toward their real aims, it works beautifully, because it's basically thunderdome in its ability to make workers slug each other and terrorize those seen as least productive. "Agile" is a case-in-point where engineers, being intellectually intelligent but socially imbecilic, assumed good faith on the part of the people managing them and came up with a framework to make those good-hearted managers' lives and jobs easier... but, of course, the people above were not good-hearted and so any components of these methodologies that actually empowered working people got ripped out while still allowing the bosses to say, "Well, you asked for this."