> there is loads about how you /should/ adapt it to work for you

Is this really happeninig in your org when adopting SAFe? At least for us - we went to all the trainings but it was essentially a two-day heavy course of a SAFe consultant telling us how to run dailies, groomings, plannings, PI plannings, retros, demos etc. etc. ALL of these were mandatory and our team was assigned a Scrum master to make sure we were actually doing them (granted, he took responsibility of organizing also the retros, which was previously a full workday for me every two months.)

I even remember reading from the SAFe book that teams are only afforded a limited autonomy of deciding on the implementation technologies of the features that are assigned. No word of having any autonomy over the process, since I understod the uniform process being a requirement for the inter-team coordination to work.