You only have to enter two fields in your workflow and it feels clunky? This doesn't jive with my experience at all but perhaps you're on an old version or it's resource starved. Once you start beating up jira or confluence you have to start tweaking defaults and jvm settings to get the most out of it.
I assume managed account means it's hosted by someone else. Unless it's Atlassian themselves they're probably being cheap and giving it as little resources as possible and it not being on-prem probably contributes to the feeling of slowness.
