These days I sometimes decide not to work on the top priority issue right now, because I suspect it'll take a few hours of uninterrupted log file reading / debugging / thinking to fix, but the day already has three different meetings scheduled.
If that's the last issue in the open sprint, choosing to add another issue to the sprint while there's still an open one tends to be a no-go, or at least causes some discussion, especially if the sprint closes without the issue being closed.
Or sometimes I simply I don't feel like working on a particular issue right now. Maybe there's no rational reason for that. I have no problem overriding that impulse if I know somebody else (either a colleague or a customer) is blocked by the issue, but if it's a case of "we have happened to include issue A in the sprint, but not issue B", having to work on A instead of B against my preference causes unnecessary resentment.
In the teams where I liked to work, I felt control over order in which I do tasks and general shape of something I was responsible for. So I could make my own decisions, decisions that would be really mine.
So when there was mess or something was late, it was my fault. I was not due to other people forcing me do things their way and I did not had to fight about every single detail, just because college happen to be anxious or control freak.
For the record, I did not liked when leader had micromanagement/dictatorship tendencies either.