feels like you have not yet had problems with bad management. Bad management can drive into the ground even a great team with very responsible engineers. They will try to fight the restrictions, burn out, and then simply give up by quitting.

This is the story that keeps unfolding again and again in front my own eyes at my work, alas.

I moved to an organization using Kanban about a year ago and couldn't be happier. I'd been doing scrum for years and had a lot of complaints similar to the author. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, but overall it seems like a bad system.

We work by having an engineering manager work out requirements with a product owner, and my manager just comes and asks me how things are going and when they're going to be done. Often times, my estimations are off, but some of that is just expected. Honestly, I'm very happy with it and I've never felt like I was doing better work.

You're incorrect.

Scrum is a framework. Kanban is a method of implementing a system.

Here's Kanban creator David J. Andersen's own words:

http://www.scrumcrazy.com/David+Andersen+-+There+is+no+kanba....

Also Kanban has certification:

http://leankanban.com/team-kanban/

And consulting services around it:

http://leankanban.com/project/services/

In the case of scrum, the role of the Product Owner is extremely important. In theory, the PO should have both a solid background in product development and business development so that the backlog can be correctly prioritized, in order to make sure that the development team can keep on working on the right stuff without discussions. In practice this is rarely the case and the PO often is just some non-technical person that is assigned to do stakeholder management, which puts additional stress on the team, contrary to the goal of keeping stress away from the team.

That's not the same Kanban as used in Software Development.

This is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)

Since 2005ish.

About 10 years after Scrum was formalised at OOPSLA 95'

Isn't Scrum Agile? Agile in corporate parlance usually means "Scrum or XP", and since XP appears to have fallen out of favor, "We are an Agile shop" means "we employ Scrum or at least intend/pretend to".