It's unfortunate because jira can be quite good: the key is minimal restrictions, and building out super-flexible workflow that allows almost any state transitions. It took me a couple years of using it with admin access to figure that out, though. It also took using something significantly worse to realize what I missed - and prior to that I was not exactly a fan.
Jira's JQL is it's superpower, at least for finding and summarizing stuff, though it is better if issues are categorized well. The key to that is making sure it's not actively hostile to your users. Unfortunately the defaults and the way the admin tools enable BOFH-syndrome make this an uphill battle, which is why so many jira installs are bad.
Now that said, the speed, stupid markup syntax and some other things still would make me do a good look for others prior to starting something on jira again. But jira can be decent, and there is much, much worse.
Jira's JQL is it's superpower, at least for finding and summarizing stuff, though it is better if issues are categorized well. The key to that is making sure it's not actively hostile to your users. Unfortunately the defaults and the way the admin tools enable BOFH-syndrome make this an uphill battle, which is why so many jira installs are bad.
Now that said, the speed, stupid markup syntax and some other things still would make me do a good look for others prior to starting something on jira again. But jira can be decent, and there is much, much worse.