This was roughly my first thought, too. It may not be nefarious, though. In many software projects, if you know what you're doing, there's a lot of work that's

This was roughly my first thought, too. It may not be nefarious, though. In many software projects, if you know what you're doing, there's a lot of work that's useful-but-optional that can be delayed to the end stages of the project. So then you front-load all your hard requirements so that you can minimize the risk that you'll miss any of them. Once that's sorted, you can just knock your way down the rest of the to-do list until you run out of time. This is actually how Scrum is supposed to work, and most the Scrum rituals are just a formalized process for doing that in a collective ownership setting. But at some point we forgot that and started confusing the means for the ends, and it all kind of fell apart.