Kimbo, I'm a business analyst who works in the Agile environment. My team sees value to the work I do. For a while the team worked without a business analyst. This caused problems identifying scope and requirements for huge projects, and also identifying what took priority.
Agile is fine for small projects, websites, mobile apps, flash games and such. It takes a nose dive when you have one team that works and supports an enterprise class product, or works simultaneously on several projects. One problem is that, for large projects, some features and functions cannot be implemented whole in one sprint. Some of these cannot even be broken into smaller features that will provide any business value on their own. Therefore, the classic Agile statement "if its too big, break it down" doesn't always work.
I can confidently say that the importance of your role as a business analyst will become aparent once your business asks your team for marketing drivers for the project, or if for some reason the project goes off track they may ask "why" that happened, or how stories evolved. Once you have a huge project, you will also quickly realize that backlog stories do not provide you with a complete picture of "what" it is supposed to accomplish. Stories often center around the "how" rather than what, and for some technical stuff the acceptance criteria doesn't really say "A should do B to be accepted". But without that technical detail, the requested feature cannot be implemented.
Also, would your team rather have your developers spend sprint time trying to figure out what a marketing person really wants (as opposed to what they say they want), or have someone do some leg work up front so the actual need is identified. The developers can then fiugre out how to do the what. This is a much more effective use of the developers' time. Imagine if your developers have to read a 200-page regulation in the middle of a sprint trying to figure out how to make the software comply. Would you consider this productive? Or would it make things easier if someone had already identified the gaps for them? I believe that the latter works better.
Agile does help with quickly reacting to changing business priorities. Place emphasis on change and risk management with agile or you will quickly start losing sight of the "what" and "why".
As for the BABOK, I do not subscribe to the "Its all we have". I think business analysis is something that anyone with an analytical mind can perform, without the need for frameworks and formalization. The BABOK does mention, though very obtusely, that do whatever works best for a particular situation. I also think that the BABOK and CBAP is a rather crude attempt at making money. If BABOK indeed is the sum of knowledge for our profession, then open its development to analysts around the world. Or at least to a subset of analysts who have some academic cred in the field. Why not make the development of the BoK an "open" thing rather than limit it to paid committee members. Do you think that the BoK for "Physics" or "Medicine" was developed by a closed group? No. These took ages to develop and required input from lots of members of the society as whole. I do not think that a select few can tell us what constitutes the body of knowledge, especially when they haven't put it through any peer review. Just my personal thoughts. Sorry for being so long winded.