Re: Modern Waterfall

Agile doesn't fail.  Agile is something you are (or you aren't.)  If the business and technology don't collaborate, then they aren't agile. Agility is the ability to turn on a dime for a dime in the words of Craig Larman.  Make effective change fast in an efficient manner.  Like Tom DeMarco wrote in "Slack" - most companies focus on efficiency and completely ignore effectiveness.  
What you saw as a manager (and probably contributed to as a manager) is the local optimization that is the enemy of agility.  It happens in all areas of companies.  Anytime I am saddled with making sure my unit, group, etc. performs top notch, I'll do whatever is necessary to achieve that, even at the expense of what we really want to do - optimizing the entire system.  Couple in performance management that rewards us for being heroes and running over each other (and other political nonsense), you have lots of trouble. 
The original intention of agility was to make work a better place - better for people, better for the organization, and better for society. More that a few firms have achieved that.  Watch the Spotify videos - I show both of them in my workshops. 
SAFe won't make you agile and neither will Scrum, or XP, or Feature Driven Development, or any homegrown framework.  We have found great ways to organize ourselves and manage our work.  Agility goes way beyond that - it includes complexity thinking, lean thinking, and systems thinking.  It's to business what cybermetrics is to baseball.  
And, we should incentivize people to experiment, which means that you incentivize them to fail because experiments fail...and learning occurs, hopefully.  Lots of orgs have found agility to some degree - they have to find it to compete and even to survive.  The secret is not to narrow the perspective to something as mundane as being something you do.  Agility is never something you do.  It is something you are.
 
I’m always a little saddened when I see someone question the motivations of a separate group. I’ve been a manager, and I’ve worked with many managers. I would say that far more of them were ultimately interested in the success of the company than their own careers. I would also say that in the management discussion groups I’ve seen, they all seem to feel that devs aren’t motivated by the success of the company, but by their desire to do cool stuff. 

If the original intent for Agile was, among other things, to heal the rift between business and development, I’d say we failed. Mostly because both “sides” are waiting for the other to change.

I’m not a fan of SAFe, and for the reason you mention. It makes it too easy to keep doing what we’ve always been doing and convince yourself that this time it will work. I’m just not comfortable saying its because “management” doesn’t’ care if things get better.