I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now).
The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy", but never with an appreciation with some of the complexity that Jira needs to solve for other users at your company, never mind other companies.
Obviously some of the complaints (speed, stability) are very valid, but here's a question I think is just as valid: why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Certainly tons of them have tried, and while many have their supporters, they are almost equally likely to have their detractors.
The fact is, building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem. In my old age as a programmer I feel like Jira is kind of like our form of government: "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others".