Agile? More like 'Fragile'

Can we just admit that mainstream agile has failed and that we need to acknowledge as 'fragile' so that we can improve it?

The agile philosophy at the heart of it has been lost amongst the rituals and ceremonies. Everyone says that they are agile, but usually ends up some form of modular waterfall divided into two week work packages. The whole idea of actually sprinting, experimenting, failing, learning fast, minimally documenting is gone from all except for the startups that agile is so ideal for.

Some of the downsides of agile that I've noticed are:

• Stakeholders want delivery dates and certainty - agile scares them

• Stakeholders usually want documentation, especially for discoveries, to show value and for knowledge transfer

• Spending more time documenting and ticket wrangling than working on the actual thing

• Serial standups mean mornings can be lost entirely

• Practitioners can often get dragged into too many meetings, creating time pressure to deliver tickets within sprint

• The whole concept of MVP is widely misunderstood

• Dual and tri-track projects are rare, making UCD harder to achieve

• Velocity seems to be a highly optional metric

• Fibonacci poker rarely makes sense and appears overcomplicated

• Retros are often polite performances rather than honest review, and when honesty happens, bad things follow so no-one is honest in retros and things are harder to improve

We appear to be stuck between waterfall and agile and getting the benefits of neither. What is the solution? How can we fix agile? Is waterfall done properly better than agile done badly? Is there another option altogether?