There is so much time wasted on this system where I work it's amazing. Some people sit all day updating JIRA with all kind of crap instead of actually doing their job.
At this point I'm starting to get the same feeling towards it as towards SAP.
Confluence is also evil. Not because it's Atlassian, but because wikis have many downsides to go along with the upsides. Everyone can create their own pages, so ... they do. And they don't keep maintaining it. So the amount of "documentation" we have is ever increasing and out of date. And like you say, a few people seem to do nothing but confluence work all day long.
Has anyone found a _good_ way to maintain documentation?
For team members, it's easier and more effective to bob a post-it onto the right white board and explain it during standup. Hosted JIRA is just infuriatingly slow for that workflow, tbh.
For everyone else, yeah. Put in a JIRA ticket, one of us will put in clarifications there. If it's something weird, we'll document steps there and convert them into a runbook later. It's good enough for that.
And by "document" I don't even mean a fancy design doc and pages of spec. Just a few sentences on why something was done, or a couple of copy-pasted command lines used for testing or reproducing a bug can be a big help.
What I have not seen, is evidence that it helps improve the data. So, if you have someone that is good at keeping the data healthy, they can make the tool look amazing. The tool doesn't really help people get there, though.
I don't think there is a universal answer here, yet. :(
I would love to be proven wrong.