Nitpicking: planning should not take a lot of effort, it should boil down to "pick the top of the backlog up to estimated capacity". So the problem you have is

Nitpicking: planning should not take a lot of effort, it should boil down to "pick the top of the backlog up to estimated capacity". So the problem you have is perhaps with grooming/estimations. Those have more value if the product owner is not part of the team, and if you work on new developments, as they help prioritize deliverables (we can do X with N effort or Y with 3N). I personally like sprints as they provide checkpoints, but they should not be treated as deadlines. It your workflow is just "do this then do that" with no feedback loop related to what you'll work on, then estimations are not useful and sprints are also less useful.