Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.
These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.
I want you to consider instead the possibility that Waterfall came to exist, and continues to exist, for the convenience of managers: people whose methods are inherited from military and civil engineering, and who, more than anything else, need you to promise them something specific, and then deliver exactly what you promised them, when you promised you’d deliver it. There exists many a corner office whose occupant, if forced to choose, will take an absence of surprises over a substantive outcome.
Features don’t work, in the sense that they can be easily gamed. A brittle and perfunctory implementation, done quickly, is going to score more intramural brownie points over a robust and complete one. If the question is "does product A have feature X?" then the answer is yes either way.
We use the term feature factory as a pejorative to designate companies addicted to adding features, while accumulating incalculable so-called technical debt. This situation is driven by management for the convenience of marketing, and I am skeptical that a more faithful application of Agile principles will correct it. Indeed, I suspect Agile processes are constitutionally vulnerable to this kind of compromise.
The presence of a feature can only indicate to a user if a goal is possible, behavior will determine how painful it will be to achieve it.