Exactly my experience. Scrum is, above all, a system of controlling people.

Although it's defined as 'an iterative and incremental software development methodology for managing product development', in reality it's a system for managing power distribution within an organisation and managing dissent.

That is both a good and bad thing, depending on which perspective you want to take. Some people love the structure and team consensus that scrum produces, others are choked by the religious/dogmatic nature of the system.

I guess the more creative types are struggling most with scrum, because they feel like they are not working at their full potential and hence feel like 'cogs' in the system.

Ah, dammit, those creative types! Why can't they just follow orders like everybody else? :-) (I haven't downvoted you, I am just explaining it.)

The author challenged your perspective and you provided no rebuttal. Neither side has any evidence, but in my anecdotal experience I agree with you. I've worked in pretty much every type of tech organization imaginable and the ones that trusted developers across the development spectrum fared best. The ones that had managers handle priorities and wanted heads down coders to implement fared worse, by far. There is an incredible amount of craftsmanship in software, and often times developers are the best product managers because a passion for product is what led them to learn to develop in the first place. Cutting them out of everything but the coding is a mistake, except for a smaller subset of coders who do prefer a heads down role. You can find good spots for them on the right team, but if you don't you end up with a lot of well written code that solves the wrong problem.

The reality is a lot of us are cogs in a machine. Anyone can make a CRUD webapp, and maybe I can do it 20% faster than someone else, with better craftsmanship that will make it easier to maintain, but fundamentally we're substitutable. Self-deception would upset me much more. I see standups as the opposite of micromanagement; they give me the opportunity to ask for what I need, and the format almost forces my manager to shut up and listen.

It does put a lot of emphasis on a single Product Owner, and there are downsides to that. For my money you get better products if one person takes responsibility for the decisions and you follow them consistently, even when on a local scale you have a better idea.

Turning developers into interchangeable cogs is the holy grail of project management. It's the motivator behind most methodologies and also a large part of the motivation for many development frameworks (J2EE comes to mind, for one).

Unfortunately this has about as much chance of working as trying to develop an assembly line manufacturing process where every product is unique. It's not possible. People keep trying though.

If you feel degraded by the version of Scrum your team is doing, then the team is doing it wrong or at least the retrospectives are not working. And if you want to make your own decisions, then you are probably better off alone. But that is not the fault of Scrum.

If almost everybody "is doing Scrum wrong", is it maybe because of its fundamentally bad design?

How do you come to think, that almost everybody is failing at it? I don't experience that. Isn't it like with every other problem in our world? We hear from them far earlier and with big noise. Success remains quiet.

You only hear about that bad ones, there's plenty of good ones.