What the OP has described is pretty much the "good agile" from the famous Steve Yegge blogpost: <a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html" rel="nofollow">http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...</a>
This is similar to my own journey from software engineer to manager and back "down" to engineer again, with similar results.<p>I'm much happier as an individual contributor than I was as a manager.