agile development and sprints

As anyone who knows the real me knows, I am deeply interested in all the agile development methodologies. Since I was back in school I wrote a paper about a variation of scrum that received great acceptance and reviews. While at work I got certified in scrum technologies and I try to be the agile evangelist in every project I work in. Doing so isn't easy, as old fashioned teams don't generally like getting introduced to a new way of doing things. People resist change and tend to be pessimistic about new processes =)
However, the way that agile development is being pushed in some big companies leaves a lot to be desired. In one of my past few weeks, I had to attend a meeting regarding how did the past two sprints go. This in principal is a great idea. You all meet in a big conference room, everyone writes down in notes what went well and what went wrong, some people organize them in clusters and then the management team goes back and works on the feedback. Be it good or bad, the management team has a clear view of how the project is going.
That's the theory...In practice, the dynamics of a huge development group are way more complex than that. When you get in the same room technical people and the business stakeholders, along with all the upper level management, hilarity ensues....The actual developers of the system don't wanna appear harsh in front of their managers and the broader team that can't understand the technical challenges of the project. The upper level management doesn't want to admit when there are serious flaws in the execution of the project as this might mean refactoring processes and this would mean a further delay in the release of it. And the last thing upper level technical management wants is to push a delay in the release and try to explain to the business people that this is because of "fixing technical/project management processes". This will appear like gibberish to the business people who don't care about how the system works, just that...it works!
The business people on the other hand, deserve a paragraph of their own! The whole meeting was a "pat each other on the back" fest...Junior product managers appraised how great their senior product managers are, senior product managers appraised project management and project management appraised back product management...All this tells me that they either have no clue how the project is going and where is it headed towards, or they are trying to prepare for the thunderstorm that is coming once the EVP's understand the full extent of issues that are dragging the project behind...
However, this was a great experience. Teached me how great agile processes are but how dangerous can they be when put in the wrong hands...
As for me? I wrote down my concerns about how code reviews are being held and that the "daily status standup" is a parody since you have so many people that people can't give any status but just bitch about blockers. But why would you wait till the standup to bitch about blockers and not just go and unblock them yourself by talking to the right people and of course why should I care about the blocker of person X with person Y who both are working in something that is totally irrelevant to my part of the platform? It makes for good work gossip though :p lol!