> I'm sure it was super painful for the people who had to actually set up the current flows, but I guess that once you customise JIRA to your needs, it can work really well. The issue probably is that many companies don't want to bother setting up good, streamlined processes, or just don't know how.

It’s actually not as bad as you’d think to set up. The reason Jira is so universally hated is because everyone uses it and very few people spend any time thinking about how it should work. In most companies it gets adopted by shadow IT, and is supported by whatever team member was most excited about it. But their competency isn’t Jira configuration, it’s widget support, so they spend the bare minimum amount of time setting it up using online tutorials and various blog/SO posts. They don’t follow any recommended best practices because they don’t know they exist. Eventually that person leaves/gets promoted or the system just becomes so widely adopted IT is forced to take over support. By this point though, the damage is done, the system is a mess of half baked badly implemented ideas. And there’s no budget/time to start from scratch. So it just limps along, being hated but no alternative being offered… until some VP discovers ServiceNow…