Agile has no process, your complaint is with Scrum and I mostly agree. The amount of rigidity in scrum has gotten out of hand. The concept of stories on a backlog and the very iterative approach is the crux of the process and I think it's great. You will always need non-user stories to get set up. Developer stories are fine by me. I also think sprint schedules are artificial and prefer a looser more KanBan approach. My biggest challenge that no one seems to have adequately addressed is working in a multi-discipline team. My scrum team includes UX, visual design, content, and we are all interdependent. It's really, really hard to get them on to scrum because their work has no clear point of completion. You just have to keep it loose which is really the core principle of scrum. It's designed to react to change more than making long-term plans.