It depends; sometimes, you'll see a huge pro-agile crowd, other times, not so much. This is accentuated if you s/agile/tdd/g;.

I'd wager this is largely due to how one is first exposed to agile methodologies. I'm young enough that I stumbled across agile as a way to solve problems, and so it sounds pretty good to me. However, my slightly older colleagues remember agile as the Newest Management Fad, with high priced consultants, seminars, certifications, and your boss paying lip service to change while still Not Getting It to match.

I like agile's philosophy, but I can certainly see lots of criticisms of Agile.

One place I worked the project managers where very enthusiastic about using Agile techniques. When I questioned them about it, it turned out that Agile to them meant "make stuff up as you go along". To them it just meant that they could resign all sense of responsibility, didn't had to do any planning or documentation. How great is that?

I always preemptively raise my eyebrows when I come across an article about agile because, in my experience, agile is mostly used by hit-and-run managers as an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions. Apparently, "embrace change" makes it okay to randomly interrupt people in their work to solve the urgency du jour, only to blame them when they miss their deadline. "Daily scrums" give the manager the green light to avoid one-on-one interactions with his team members.

Interestingly, the best development teams rarely display overt enthusiasm for their "methodology" and just get work done.

The problem is that "agile" doesn't mean anything.

On my team we follow an agile approach, but we also have rough ideas on product direction for the next year or so and themed releases planned out for the next few months.

For us it all comes down to an understanding that if something else comes up then some of these features are going to have to slip to get other things in. It also means not building things that we ultimately aren't going to use.

If you just think that Agile means "don't plan, just do whatever you want" (i.e. Chaos) then of course you're going to hate it. No one can work like that.