My team does point based estimation and I like it. The points are useful for getting an idea of how much stuff to work on in a sprint and a measure for how much

My team does point based estimation and I like it. The points are useful for getting an idea of how much stuff to work on in a sprint and a measure for how much room we need to leave in for the inevitable and consistent problems that we have to pick up mid sprint. The real benefit imo is that it is a good shorthand during estimation that reveals misunderstandings or flaws in a ticket. Everyone pointing a ticket at a 2 is whatever, literally any time spent discussing if it is a 2 vs a 3 drains my vitality, but every time there is a big outlier or bimodal distribution we get a lot of value from talking it out. I think what points gets you here over hours is that it focuses on the task at hand. I think a time centric approach requires your estimates to be more like 'X hours for John, Y hours for Shirley'. I'm not touching your points about how there are other contexts where it doesn't make sense to do this, or the absurdity inherent in pretending that they don't still boil down to time in a meaningful sense because I agree with them.