This seems to me to be a conversation about semantics. Ie.

IF

You and I both view John to have the same:

1) Reliability and responsibility 2) Intellectual formidability 3) Conventional "agentiness"

BUT

You think that intellectual formidability is part of what makes someone "agenty" and I don't.

THEN

We agree about everything that's "real", and only are choosing to define the word "agent" differently.

I anticipate a reasonable chance that something in this conversation just went right over my head, and that it's about something much deeper than semantics.

For what it's worth, when I think of the word "agenty" I think almost exclusively about property 3. Another way to put it might be the extent to which your behavior is a result of your impulses.

I imagine some sort of spectrum from "I act based on my impulses and I believe things based on the immediate feelings they provoke in me" to "I stop and think about the costs and benefits before acting, I explore multiple hypotheses, and I do the same for my beliefs".