Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

I don't mean to be harsh on anyone, but after working for over a decade in enterprises, mediocrity seems to be the norm. There are of course bright and insightful people, but mediocrity is pretty much the standard. Take any good process, technical practice or whatever and see it be abused and misused.

With Agile what happens is a mediocre implementation that usually leads to the usual complaints we see about Agile. The number of times I've been told about how Scrum enables self-organising teams only to be told I have no control over the process because it has been standardised across the company.

Mediocrity demands cookie cutter solutions that can be standardised without need to engage thinking. If you work in an incompetent organisation, department or team, then there's no hope that agile or anything else can help you. In fact, the religious nature of Agile often works in favour of mediocrity as critics, even well-meaning ones, get labelled as waterfall sympathisers.