Has the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tell you that most people hated working with them.
Counter-intuitive, yes, but no worse than that so long as there's another symbol you can use for when you do need a double-backslash. But, the thing is, there isn't. When Confluence was first designed, they used up their only escape char with their nonstandard newline symbol. This is, their support staff informed me, a deep-rooted and unchangeable aspect of how Confluence works. It's not a bug, because it will never be changed.
This should give you the gist of what Atlassian is like.
It wouldn't be nearly as infuriating if it weren't caused by such a terrible design decision (using doubled backslashes for line breaks when the backslash is your only escape char) in the first place.
\\ -> new line
\\\\ -> \\\\
\\Foo -> Foo
\\Foo\Bar -> \\Foo\Bar