You are talking from a fixed, assembly line perspective of having to deliver fixed value at fixed intervals. This is just not how I think of myself - as a cog in a machine. If you have to think of people this way because this is the only way your job functions in a huge corporation then do it but the ideal world doesn't work that way and therefore I don't want to work that way. I'm never going to be happy in a job where a PM isn't enabling me to do whatever I think is right for the product. Because just like you I happen to think that my ideas are good, so it would be a waste to just sit in a job like a soulless cog and work off an issue list every week with zero thought or input. Expecting people to be like this is probably why you get people like this.