I absolutely hate dealing with vendors who use Salesforce.com. It's a red flag that support might be dismal. The only lesson to be taken from this is that you can build a business around a terrible product.
Among other duties, I am in charge of maintaining the Knowledge Base for our product. SF's Knowledge article capabilities, however, are abysmal. The default formatting is atrocious, barely above plaintext. SF will allow you to try to "jazz it up" by turning on HTML mode. However, due to the incredibly small character limit per article, trying to insert any more than a few paragraphs with proper HTML formatting will quickly exhaust that limit (the HTML tags themselves are counted as part of the character limit). Something as simple as creating a Table of Contents for a longer article hence becomes a nightmare in implementation.
To boot, those articles do not have static links that I can disseminate, meaning that when I'm trying to point people to a particular article, I have to tell them "Go to the Knowledge Base and search for 'X'." This is, frankly, embarrassing to put on something like a Newsletter.
In the effort to integrate two distinct factions in the business, they decided the best approach was not to find one holistic tool that works for both cases, nor unify the process across the company but to do the following crime:
Integrate an on-site established JIRA processes with cocked up Salesforce lack of processes with bidirectional escalation and updates!
So now the shitball of chaos and incompetence that is support and sales teams can directly lay turds into the development team's toolchain, not that they're any better in the majority. Likewise the other way, the developers can write internal swearing and technical information all over salesforce cases which can get published to the clients all the time...
And yes we're doing the same with the knowledgebase but we're pushing it and release notes from JIRA into it.
Now I'm no fan of JIRA the money-sink by any means, as a guy who supported it for a number of years, but neither platform is a good match for a well established company devoid of any reasonable processes and going through a rapid reinvention phase.
Ugh.