they will be blindsided by creeping quality issues...

The fact of the matter is that too many people think that projects can be run through the interface of stories and feature lists without paying attention to the quality of the software underneath. And, when you don't pay attention to it, it suffers. This, really, is _Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions_ applied to process. Business wants to see features, and if that abstraction is their only view of the project, they will be blindsided by creeping quality issues. It's nearly inevitable.