I'm sorry that has been your experience with agile. That doesn't sound very good. In my experience, if agile rituals take more than three hours per 2-week sprint, something is not aligned with the team or the project. Maybe the necessary skills aren't there. Maybe the team doesn't trust each other. Perhaps the project plan is not aligned with business goals, etc. None of these problems can be solved by adding more agile rituals.

How I prefer to run it:

- 1h per week alternating between estimating and planning

- (optional) 1h per sprint for backlog refinement

I like to keep two sprints worth of work in the backlog. More than that, the spec will change too much, and you will re-estimate. When a project has just started, or the requirements have become understood differently, to get four weeks of backlog work may require additional refinement. I typically do the bulk of this refinement myself (as a tech lead), and I try to avoid asking the team to have any extra meetings beyond what I mentioned above.

It can be good to have retros sometimes, but it's better to have a team that feels safe to share and discuss issues constructively without a mediator.

I'd also like to advocate for 1:1s. We are all humans and social organisms. Ideally, these 1:1s are 80% unrelated to a work task.