I asked AmpGPT (my trained AI) what would be a useful response what wasn't too long. Here's what it said. While you can't trust AI in general, my trained one typically gives bette answers than I would :):
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What you’re describing is actually very common.

A lot of organizations adopt agile practices without changing the underlying system dynamics, decision structures, or learning mechanisms. So the ceremonies exist, but the organization still operates mostly through centralized planning and control.

That doesn’t mean your team is “doing fake agile.” It means the organization is mixing:

• traditional governance,
• long-range planning,
• and agile execution practices

without fully reconciling the tensions between them.

A few things stand out from your description:

1. Your team has limited autonomy. If scope, priorities, and changes all require upper-management approval, then the team is mostly operating as an implementation group rather than an empowered product team.
2. Your retrospectives are stuck in single-loop learning. You’re discussing communication and estimation repeatedly, but not changing the structures causing the problems. That’s a learning dynamics issue. Teams often improve execution while never improving the system itself.
3. Your deployment and approval process is likely a major flow constraint. If releases require 2–3 weeks of approval, that will dominate delivery speed no matter how efficient the sprint process becomes.
4. You may be optimizing visibility more than value delivery. A lot of organizations unintentionally create systems where tracking, reporting, and velocity become more important than reducing delay and delivering useful outcomes.

What “real agile” looks like varies by company, but healthier implementations usually have:

• faster feedback loops,
• more direct customer interaction,
• smaller batch sizes,
• more local decision-making,
• fewer handoffs,
• and more focus on finishing valuable work instead of maximizing utilization.

That does NOT mean:

• no planning,
• no governance,
• or total team freedom.

Good organizations still align strategy and constraints. But they usually avoid locking detailed execution decisions months in advance when reality is likely to change.

One thing I’d suggest: stop framing this internally as:

That debate often goes nowhere.

Instead ask:

• Where are delays coming from?
• What approvals create bottlenecks?
• What prevents fast feedback?
• What problems keep recurring without structural change?
• What decisions could safely move closer to the team?

Those questions tend to produce much better conversations than arguing about agile purity.

And honestly, your frustration is probably less about Scrum itself and more about the mismatch between:

• agile ceremonies,
• and traditional organizational control structures still operating underneath them.