Jira's raise to power is one of those things I would never understand. Such a horribly designed tool. Today is much better, yes, but it is so over-engineer and at the same time lacks so many things.
I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package.
I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.
The problem is that the workflow you officially have and wish you used is almost never the actual workflow, so it becomes horribly confused and insane.
Even for internal projects, a lot of money is thrown at software because the corporation has decided (rightly or wrongly) that it's easier than changing process, culture, personnel, or internal incentives.
For example, salespeople on commission were closing not-very-profitable deals. The response was to layer in a complicated project feasibility/profitability estimation logic, configuration features for an "approval" org-chart hierarchy between users, and various new triggers to block the workflow at particular steps and e-mail people to come click and approval button... I still feel it would have (should have?) been better to change how the sales commissions worked.
To my great consternation, I have not found this to be true in the cloud version:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72631
Special thanks to Matt Lachman for keeping up the good fight every (business) day.
It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds.
Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.
But that thing is slow as a snail. Even if it's an on-prem installation. I want nimble tools.
I know it's a very unpopular opinion, but I'll take a fast Redmine over a slow Jira all day, every day.
P.S.: Another slow tool like this is OpenStack. Every CLI command, every web UI click means a ping-pong of 20 REST requests. At least, when it works, it works, which is 100% of the time if it's configured correctly.