People will nit pick over, sometimes justifiable, UI/UX issues with the product but the level of hatred you see can't be explained by that alone.
In reality the problem is with Scrum and Agile.
Jira has implemented all those features because that's what the industry (managers and people that like control) wanted Agile to become, so, to make money they did so. I don't blame them for that, they aren't the defenders of Agile. Again, the problem isn't Jira.
If you strip away all the reporting, burn down charts etc what you are left with is an exceptionally powerful Kanban board with, in my opinion, a solid user experience.
Except the reporting is what the paying users want i.e. the managers.
- Trello feels like a toy (it's not, we use it extensively for core business activities but I don't like it for software) - GitHub issues feels too focussed on devs - Todoist is clearly designed for solo use - Monday.com is for more generic project management - Notion is a mess when you have a lot of tickets - I don't want to use ClickUp
After going though all of those I realised that Jira is pretty good for me.
It's possible to use Jira well (ish) but it requires constant effort. If you ever take your eye off the ball you'll have irreversible transitions and workflows that only certain people can do and you'll start using ticket numbers instead of issue descriptions and end up fighting the tool more than working.
But I guess the mystery to me is, without all the "extra" - how complex is this topic space, really? It feels like it's just a shim over something like Github issues so you can render the board, rather then anything else.
On top of that, good luck making changes to anything. The structural configuration for board, screens, and fields is buried in a maze. Something as simple as changing the options on a single select custom field (say, to add a new team) consistently took me upwards of 30 mins of clicking fruitlessly through the UX every time I had to do it, because it was so unintuitively buried and hidden.
Personally, that's why I despise Jira.
Not from my perspective, I will happily 'dunk' on it because the UI/UX is so ridiculously slow and non responsive sometimes. It's a nightmare when we need to close a particularly large sprint out. Everything doesn't need to be 'drag & drop' . Trying to navigate the right fields to update is a numbers game, even if its a simple waterfall flow.
They tried to do everything and that's great. But the UI suffers for it, its slow, incredible memory heavy to run on-premise, crashes in the browser frequently. It's not the best tool for the job.