We use Jira in a very small company and I avoid it when possible. Wrote a command line hours tracker, that saves 1/3rd of my usage. Maybe I'll write an issues CRUD application some time as well, but I think going further down that rabbit hole costs more time than it saves.

My previous employer was a little larger (some 40 employees) and I can say that Jira solves nothing that we couldn't solve much better with text files parsed by Perl/Python/sed/awk, sometimes having a little bit of editing help (such as syntax checking on :w) from Vim/Sublime plugins (both had users that maintained their plugins).

Maybe Jira is meant for larger companies? There is a ton of special characters that trigger all sorts of crap: square brackets, double curly braces, ampersands, semicolons, colons, underscores, asterisks, at symbols, backslashes, octothorpes, pluses, carets, tildes, double question marks, pipes, and even hyphens. It takes about num_characters*20 seconds to escape a regex so it doesn't format or hide parts of it (it doesn't help that you can only check by saving, a lot of formatting does not show up in the "visual editor"), but there are probably a lot of features there that one could be using.