Great that it works for you.
Does it take time? Sure. But what's the alternative? Not doing it is even worse, because you wind up with these endless never-finished "features" that turn out to be 20x harder than anyone thought, that engineers have sunk months and months and months into...
The truth is on most teams one or two people who are closest to the task have enough context to estimate, and probably only after they spent some time starting or prototyping the task.
Those people can give a reasonable estimate, in time not some strange point system.
Sometimes the estimate is wrong and that’s ok.
It’s fine to have a meeting catching everyone else up on the context but those pther people still likely don’t have enough to give an accurate estimate and shouldn’t be involved in estimation
But the fact remains that in most environments, it's extremely useful for medium-term planning and especially in surfacing high-risk features that can send people down the wrong path for a long time. And it's meant to benefit stakeholders -- the people paying the developers' salaries -- not individual developers. It's about de-risking.
And if you really have the kind of team you seem to describe where everybody only works on their specific type of task and can't even estimate anybody else's work, then that's a danger situation when they leave or get sick or whatever and nobody else can step in and everyone's blocked because the only person who can do X is gone. Usually, you should be actively getting other developers to work on these features (usually the easier/smaller ones) and involving them in the estimation.
To the developer, it seems like short-term sprint planning. But to the PM and stakeholders, it's very much medium-term planning because they're picking tasks for this sprint in light of what they also estimate the following couple sprints will look like (given current information, which is always going to change).
It's not as bad as it sounds, because when you're re-estimating something you already estimated in the past 2 planning pokers, it's usually pretty quick. You're just seeing if the previous estimate needs to be revised based on what the team has learned since. Most time is usually spent on newly proposed features, or features that have significantly changed or been split up.
I'm not sure if it's the fun category, but at least they are useful and because of that, satisfying to do. In fact when I finish a solid suite of tests or good, clear documentation, I find it very satisfying. I can't say the same for poker/estimation. I've found to be them a complete waste of time in every job I've had and therefore soul sucking.
> you seem to describe where everybody only works on their specific type of task and can't even estimate anybody else's work, then that's a danger situation when they leave or get sick or whatever and nobody else can step in and everyone's blocked because the only person who can do X is gone
you're conflating the ability to estimate accurately with the ability to implement.
Just because I can't estimate a task accurately doesn't mean I can't do it.
> Just because I can't estimate a task accurately doesn't mean I can't do it.
Most programmers could ultimately do anything... if given enough time.
But if they're going to do it professionally, you expect them to have some prior experience so they can do it somewhat efficiently. And if they have that experience, they should be able to estimate.
So yes, being able to estimate and being able to do (with reasonable professional efficiency), do tend to correlate, of course.