This has not been my experience. I have known some excellent software engineers that advocate Agile development. The problem is that many people say they are using Agile development techniques when in actual fact they are just using the 'code like hell' technique with no design. There are aspects of Agile development that you can't leave out and still call it Agile - like unit testing for instance. Without the unit testing you can't refactor and without the ability to refactor you haven't got Agile. I would also say that Design Patterns are frequently applied overzealously. If they are making a design more complicated then they are being applied incorrectly. Once you've seen these techniques applied correctly you realise how beneficial they are. Applied incorrectly they cause mayhem.

Use Subversion with TortoiseSVN. It integrates into Explorer and you don't need the VS integration. It's a wonderful package - it just does everything you need. Perhaps a little heavyweight for personal use.