There seems to continue to be this idea in management that process will take the place of skilled programmers.
This is true, but it's not what Agile originators meant. The early Agile stuff was exactly the opposite. E.g. the initial SCRUM paper starts out talking about "Small teams of competent individuals, working within a constrained space that they own and control." Extreme Programming specifically removed from management the power to arbitrarily mandate a schedule:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/extreme-programming-bill...