No, I have no problem with you calling that agency. Clearly it adds agency to the game for you. Access to those knobs impacts your sense of agency. My gripe is not with that claim. You will note, I don't say, the all powerful GM is the only way this can be done. For me it is an essential feature of what made RPGs tick when I first encountered them, and crucial for opening up agency in something like a sandbox. But that doesn't mean what you are doing automatically has less agency. This is why I have been saying I am all for big tent. If people want PbtA sandboxes, I am all for it.
Where I am saying people are wrong is in this framing of it as agency as this objective thing, that goes up or down depending on style. And then the framing of the definition so in a sandbox you are at like 50% agency and in something like Blades in the Dark or Burning Wheel, you are at 80 or 90% agency. I am not the one framing this as living sandboxes are better. And I am trying to provide usage of the word agency that accounts for these two wildly different answers to the problem of railroading. When people say they want to run something like Blades int eh Dark, I don't say "if you cared about agency, you would probably prefer a sandbox living world, because that gives you more of what you say you love".
I am saying when you set up the definition of the term itself so it favors what you play as offering maximum agency, then when people throw in very acrobatic arguments about the GM needing to give players the most information when they can, even if that were obviously to be constrained by setting, the deck is being stacked in favor of a play style
I would say, the best way forward is common ground on terms like agency that don't treat it like yardage in a football match.
