Not to be confrontational, but I'd wager that you've never developed in an agile context for any longer period of time?
Now I'm watching as another 'Agile' team pushes 6x4 cards around (at least they've managed to adopt a half-assed electronic version of that). Sadly there's no methodology that'll save them, but that's a different problem.
YMMV but we've used several agile ideas (for example iterations, retrospectives, stop-the-line) to great effect to reign in scope creep, increase quality, reduce overtime and make people happier, overall.