Agreed. Admittedly I've only used JIRA at a couple of smaller places with small teams, and perhaps it fails if you have massive dev teams, but so far it's been pretty great.

Criticizing JIRA is easy, because it has enough rough edges that people get unhappy with it and, while it’s highly configurable, configuration is hard and odds are the way your JIRA workflow is configured doesn’t quite match the way you would configure it if it were up to you, because it manages the organizational concerns of what needs to get done and by whom in a consistent way independent of the personal concerns of the people doing the work.

Jira is like C++ or representative democracy or capitalism: compared to your internal mental model of things, it’s a needlessly complicated and shitty system, but try to find an alternative that sustainably works for as many different use cases before writing it off.

(Also, much like these things, Jira takes a lot of heat for things that are just part of the human condition but only seem that way because it’s a mechanism for addressing facts about the world that are inherently annoying to us, especially the fact that a lot of people want dumb shit that you may not personally agree with.)

My issue with JIRA is not that it's bad. As you've rightly said, it's a lovely tool that does everything you might need for project-based work.

My issue is that JIRA takes a long time to set up in an optimal way. I've worked at places with great JIRA setups, but burnt-out PM's that would spend ages setting their sprints up. The time either came from working late, or neglecting other duties to get stuff done for the devs, which isn't ideal for a project that needs management.

The secondary problem is when you work with someone that really knows JIRA, it becomes the tool for everything. They've invested a lot of knowledge into the platform, so why wouldn't they push it for everything? It's no different to a developer gaining a ton of WordPress knowledge and deciding that WP can be a data store for every software product.

JIRA gets a lot of hate from people because they have experienced colleagues/managers trying to use it to manage everything when all that is needed is a bug/feature tracking system. So basically it gets turned into a 'task tracker' when all the devs want is a 'bug tracker' with the result being that a) reporting on tasks becomes more important than doing the tasks, and b) the bug/feature tasks get lost in the noise.

Not sure yet. Asana seems much better. Basically anything that doesn't encourage upper management to enforce unnecessary process. The fact that 2 of the 5 companies I've worked with have had full time jobs dedicated to "JIRA administrator" suggests that it's a majorly overcomplicated solution.

So far I have been pretty happy with Trello, actually. You can configure it as you want.

That said, at this point just use the bug tracker that is built-in to your git hosting solution.