Do you use Atlassian tools? We use Confluence and Jira (especially with Greenhopper) on the project I am currently working on. They are not perfect but I would hardly call them abominable.
My Atlassian experience is only with JIRA as a developer. I'm with mml. The user interface drive me nuts. It gets in the way of me communicating with the team.
The dashboard reports things like time changes. "gry changed the Time Spent to '13920' on FOO-1000" I don't care how many seconds someone spent on an issue. If you have to configure a humane interface, something is wrong.
This is a small example. It takes my locus of attention away from doing what I'm paid to do, write software.
I need to communicate with the team and ask questions in order to get more information to complete an issue. I'm still responsible, yet our workflow requires us to assign the issue to someone in order for the question to be answered, then assigned back. It feels like I'm shuffling tickets rather than communicating around a ticket. The emails sent aren't humane. Don't get me going.
Yet, I can't reply to a JIRA ticket via email as a standard install?
The gist is, after using JIRA daily for seven months, I'm struggling. It feels like the user interface reflects the data model and I don't want to learn it. I get it, it's powerful. But why introduce how complex it is right away? There is no carrot. There's a carrot pile and when you're building velocity, it's not fun to jump over.
If you find your workflow requires you to assign an issue for a question to be answered before assigning it back it sounds like a workflow issue, not a problem with the tool.
We use Greenhopper primarily due to having teams located in different states, working on the same project. Having two physical story walls is too hard in this situation and Greenhopper is a nice collaboration tool that solves this problem.
If I want to communicate with a team member and they are not the original reporter or the assigned user they will NEVER see the question posted. There is no good way of notifying a user that they should answer a question on a task without first assigning it to them.
JIRA with greenhopper is absolutely horrible and has caused many hours of frustration in attempting to get the tool to work to our standards and what we need from it.
They also seem like an enjoyable company to work for.