Agile™, as I've encountered it, is collectivized micromanagement.

Ahhh...

You just put into words what’s been bothering me about the way my team works. The “process” people—while well-intentioned—seem to think that by breaking inherently complex tasks up in just the right way, they can make the complexity go away.

Well, no. If that’s really the idea, why are you paying me so much?

Exactly and it's almost perfectly orthogonal to engineering.

There's probably some truth to that. That's what a sprint basically is, right?

If you run your sprints right then no, nothing's set in stone. If something comes up in the middle of the sprint that takes priority, you address it. You don't mindlessly stick to the schedule set (that would be a "tiny waterfall.")

Fair enough. Although waterfalls usually weren't really set in stone either in my experience. Which had both good and bad points. (It's good to be adaptable but changing requirements all the time is also a good way to make a project late.)

This sounds is/ought-y? What is the prevalence of running sprints right in the real world? "As practiced" was the important part of my question/observation.