Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

Well, for one you're definitely being hyperbolic. Half of every day in meetings is worse than the worst agile shop I've ever seen by factor of 10. Also, agile doesn't require any meetings ever. Scrum recommends a cadence of specific meetings which should add up to maybe 2-4 hours per week, but I consider that approach only necessary for immature teams. Also, agile doesn't promise faster delivery. There's no way to project manage your way to faster coding. The only critical principal is iterative improvement meaning that you deliver features to full quality in priority order. The idea is to always have a stable main branch and be able to accurately measure progress even when priorities change. The value is for the team knowing exactly what's expected of them at any given time and for stakeholders to see exactly what is and isn't done at any point. Teams and developers will always run at different paces for different projects. Good agile process is about visibility.

Agile isn't one thing and isn't gonna fix a bad team, and does nothing to address problems with management. I have had great successes with forms of it, but that doesn't mean that it's the best fit for every team.

I feel for you, but this is really "not Agile". The point is shipping working software every sprint, and during the sprint you are not supposed to be interrupted until Sprint demo.

It's on the so-called Product Owner to prioritize what's next sprint, projections, etc, and a Scrum Master is supposed to help protect you from distractions.

I've done this style of agile before, and it's great. However the issue is many mgmt types still only caring about when "all of this will be done?", and also teams and people which can't think incrementally.

Generalizing methodologies is hard. What works for a 5 people startup might not for a few thousand multi-decade company. Or even for another 5 people startup with different culture.

It’s not that you can’t learn from previous experience, but we have an unhealthy tendency of looking for a one-size-fits-all solution that comes with a bunch of fashionable names attached in this industry.

> My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings

This doesn't have anything to do with agile. You can run "agile" with as little as an hour of meetings a week if you want. Planning, retro, refinement in one weekly, async standup in Slack. You can bring standups in person, have them daily or less frequently, adjust the frequency, change your sprints from 1 to 2 weeks.

Even the heaviest weight version of this I can imagine (daily 30 min standups, 1 hour planning, 30 min retro, weekly sprints) adds up to 4 hours total for the week. So what you're describing is 80% something beyond that.

> taking 2 weeks and 4 meetings with 10 developers on each call just to deliver a simple list-filter feature fit in?

This sounds like you've moved from smaller company to bigger company and are noticing things move slower, though correct me if I'm wrong.

Either way, these are the questions: Why does the feature actually take two weeks to build? Are there more factors beyond the team? Larger scale? More testing / QA needed than pushing out to prod? Just plain worse developers? Bad PR practices that delay the feature? These factors again are nothing to do with "agile".

Another person asked this well, but really you've offered no notes on what your old team did differently that was not "agile". What's the alternative that people are missing?