To me, the bare minimum for success in software development is clear direction, continuous communication, and continuous verification of the product. Scrum is a simple process to ensure that all three actually occur and aren't merely good intentions left up to individual discretion. I guess you could come up with alternatives, but it would be tough to make it much simpler and still cover all three.
I've done formal scrum before, and I can see where you're coming from, but my experience scrum didn't ensure continuous communication. The company where I worked actually actively prevented cross-team communication. They did this because the scrum masters and director of engineering claimed it would generate work that couldn't be captured by stories, so velocity couldn't be accurately tracked and people's time could be spent on the "wrong" things. I took as project managers not trusting the engineers to do their jobs.
Again, I don't think scrum is all bad, nor do I think it's hard to grok or follow. It's how people adhere to it, and in my experience, people really adhere to it in a way that's detrimental to productivity. For me, it's kind of like religion - I like some of the ideas, but I don't like the fan club.
Not sure I understand the communication policy you guys were dealing with. If a team is meeting briefly every day and sharing their progress, it ensures that there's at least that much communication. But the daily standup should be a floor on communicating, not a ceiling.
