I don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the out of the box experience is reasonable though.
I think that's exactly it - the first time people experience Jira is often in heavily customized workflow-from-hell situations where the Jira Admins are far removed from the users.
You can truly create some workflow nightmares and there's nothing in the app to discourage it apart from org culture.
IMO, this is the right idea. I've worked on small projects using Jira primarily as a means of ticket management, and I've worked on giant orgs with scrums and groomings and all that.
As far as a tool, it's perfectly fine. A lot of my bad feelings came as a result of wanting it to be simple ("What should I work on next") but it being twisted into a series of incantations and rituals by those looking to bend it for the purposes of more and more intricate views into how we spend every moment of our day.
Yeah thats the real pain point, but also just the basic operation of jira sucks. The interface is really confusing and difficult to navigate and changes drastically every time theres an update every few years. Then also its SLLOOOOOWWW. For a program that millions of people use all day every day that does nothing more than display text, its pathetically slow.
