Agile (EDIT: The Agile Manifesto specifically) is meant to solve a very specific problem. It's meant to solve the problem of describing software via a contract

Agile (EDIT: The Agile Manifesto specifically) is meant to solve a very specific problem. It's meant to solve the problem of describing software via a contract, taking a long time to build the software described in that contract, and then the software not being useful despite an enormous amount of effort/resources poured into it. If you are working in an optimized team, that understands the business, understands the customer, and efficiently and incrementally delivers business value building the right kind of software then these practices won't help you and as you point out may actually hurt you. The above though is some minuscule fraction of software teams in the real world (and some may not know it). The problem with Agile practices and Scrum is that despite their theoretical ability to improve the way we build software, and the good intentions of the original ideas, inefficient teams and companies will always find a way to adopt the practices they think are good (and therefore keep them inefficient) while rejecting the practices that may help them. That's the conundrum of pretty much any process (and funny enough "people over process" in a twisted way means people that have no clue will subvert any process that tried to push for doing things better in most orgranizations).