Not saying this counts specifically but I love seeing devs who hate Jira build something like Jira to solve managing a team of agents. It’s a beautifully ironic thing to watch.
Chat is great for novel open-ended work, but is terrible at concurrency - i.e. managing > 1 agent runs. As agents get cheaper, I suspect we'll see more more bounded processes where you want to run lots of items through them at once, and thus Jira-like things... (we ended up having this problem and building something like this, albeit more medieval themed [0])
We also found the other piece that Jira-style solves (and that chat makes super hard) is multi-player. I've yet to see a good implementation of a multi-player chat solution to agents working concurrently; and we found that an async model is the only sane solution to this.
The vanilla out of the box product is actually quite close to old Trello, in simplicity. But there are so many ways to fuck it up and overcomplicate it, and so many companies proceed to fuck it up and overcomplicate it.
I have learned recently that I don't inherently hate JIRA, I hate our JIRA and byzantine process flows.
I think because other task trackers like Trello are simpler and have less config options (per my last use, long ago, pre-Atlassian-acquisition), it's impossible knock on wood to get into the antipatterns I've seen in those tools.
Ironically I think one of the main goals of management I have seen consistently over time - ensuring tickets are accurate, up to date, and reflect reality - would end up much more true if the task tracking tools were just much simpler, with fewer fancy features.
So what they really hate is their company. Which is usually fair and understandable.
I think what you describe is a problem for a lot of people, but what isn't acknowledged is that some people don't want any kind of process, or rather, they don't want to deal with any kind of friction. These people don't like Jira without the customizations. They don't like equivalent tools.
Given these tools regiment the world to some extent, many programmers are fine with the minimal friction. However, you have big problems when people who don't value any process get into positions of authority. This is also often a problem when you interface with other units of an organization who don't understand the value of a process.
It’s business software for business people that need to be guided through SOP because they have so many different workflows, not engineers that have streamlined work processes to reduce mental load on non-engineering work.
Unfortunately I work for a very large corporation and don’t have the pull to get something like Epiq brought on - but I am definitely going to evaluate it for my non-FTE work.
As a side note - it was impossible to find your project through search engines. I only found it by searching on github itself.
Need a specific feature? Plug that in later when you actually need it.