My observation as a user is that it's still good if you are starting a new account from scratch. But if you have been using it for a decade and made lots of customizations and added plugins over the years, they get more clunky as they continue to update their product.
I don't even think Jira is specifically bad. If someone was only using it for basic project managment and ticketing, it'd be acceptable.
However, occupies the same niche as SAP or Oracle businessware.
First, Take a service that must be ergonomic because people rely on it all day to do their job. Next, make the primary requirement the ability for managment and finance to run reports. Then, outsource it to a company that wants to add custom web frameworks on top of a decades old project. Finally, graft on decades of customizations done by different generations of contractors.
Agreed. Jira makes it easy to add a new field, plugin, or workflow step for a particular use case, but it is much more difficult to determine if an existing field/plugin/workflow step can be safely removed. As a result, everyone is afraid to touch it, projects accumulate cruft over the years, and it degrades the entire workflow. The problem is especially bad if there is shared ownership of JIRA, and therefore everyone feels empowered to add, but nobody feels responsible for the dirty work to clean up the mess from time to time.
My company had resisted the urge to bolt on additions more than most. We recently migrated from Cloud to on-prem Server as a result of being acquired, and it is amazing how much zippier our project is compared to some of the peer projects that have accumulated cruft.
If you can admin your own Jira instance and keep the fields and plugins to exactly what you need, it's pretty nice. I keep going back to it for the customizable workflows and fine-grained access control.
Unfortunately, every corporate Jira instance I've ever worked with has been overrun with every possible field possible, an unnecessary and constantly shifting mishmash of plugins and horribly slow access. You're paying the price for all of that cruft that you don't need and which can't be removed because "maybe someone wants it."
> every corporate Jira instance I've ever worked with has been overrun with every possible field possible
I've seen multiple different fields for the same value, each of them created for their specific team. The instance is slow AF most of the time due to the bloat and often I can't even assign a sprint to a JIRA because the field doesn't load anymore.
