To be fair, Agile is not about leveraging mediocre developers - it's about enabling a handful of your best, most experienced hackers and architects (the fabled "two-pizzas team") to work under the best possible conditions, because the proponents of Agile had internalized the lesson that trying to scale up large teams of mediocre devs is a fool's errand.
Agile is what managers make it to be. To A LOT OF THEM it is about not doing any planning, writing zero specifications, using vague language for requirements, comparing performance of apples and oranges, "self-help"/motivational, justification to pressure those below and not bother with those above and so on and on.
But to most, it is just putting lipstick on the same old pig.
Did I mention the whole training, coaches and lango flinging industry?
Agile in it's original form - yes. Many everyday biz versions of agile et al - No.
Fundamentally, dev is something to negotiate with, cooperatively, versus commanding "do what I say"-style. Many businesses are unable or unwilling to do away with this top-down hierarchy, hence agile will never succeed there.
The agile they practise instead is "Agile, but without actually relinquishing top-down control".
TBH, I think what we are really missing is for the development team to be a contract team (ala Accenture) that can implement agile via official mediums e.g. pushback via contractually negotiation, backlog prioritisation via contract pricing ("we can do that, but this is what it'll cost").
