One way to look at it: did you ever see a place explicitly following the manifesto successfully ?
To me the real message was "think for yourself and do what works best for you", and the organizations that actually do that typically don't need to be given directions and don't follow advice from productivity gurus. Toyota didn't read the Agile Manifesto and come up with their own solution to their own problems.
The people that fell in love with Agile where the most further from it, the message was vague enough that they would seek more concrete frameworks, which inevitably would put them out of the "think for yourself" zone.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It was the same with Extreme Programming before that: If your team is good enough to apply the techniques, they don't need to follow a recipe that's written down. That seems to be the principal problem with this kind of offering: Those who need it, aren't quite capable of applying it right, and it becomes a mockery.
To me the real message was "think for yourself and do what works best for you", and the organizations that actually do that typically don't need to be given directions and don't follow advice from productivity gurus. Toyota didn't read the Agile Manifesto and come up with their own solution to their own problems.
The people that fell in love with Agile where the most further from it, the message was vague enough that they would seek more concrete frameworks, which inevitably would put them out of the "think for yourself" zone.