to be fair JIRA does throw the kitchen sink in at the beginning and for effective use of JIRA, your team needs to 1) pick what to use and pick what not to use, 2) commit to it, and 3) have an experienced JIRA person that knows how to turn off everything else, and also 4) pray that JIRA doesn't suddenly turn your preferred usage mode into "legacy" which you can't use in new projects moving forward.

I agree. I use JIRA at work (cloud hosted) with all kinds of plugins (TestRail, Aha, etc.) and its a horrifying experience, on top of that all the fields that are used for (micro?)managing people and work is cumbersome to work with.

For my personal projects I use JIRA server (solely because its cheap at $10 and has a decent mobile app to capture ideas in tickets/boards on the move) and my experience has been pretty good.

That being said if Github had a good mobile app I'd switch in a minute. My main problem with Github issues is that you cannot edit milestones in the mobile web app.