I am reading this comment thread and honestly I don't know that I agree. I think JIRA, like most tools, is as good or bad as you make it. I've been at numerous companies using JIRA that don't seem to have most of the issues referenced here. The only thing I've ever felt like JIRA really lacked in was in a good UX for embedding code snippets or other technical details into issue comments. Native support for Markdown in comments would be a good win.
I actually like JIRA and Confluence and have generally had good experiences using them in multiple companies. One of the main things I like is the integration between the two, and Confluence's concept of spaces so you can have some things publicly facing and other things private, which allows you to use Confluence documentation as user-facing docs, which references JIRA issues directly for known issues, and can write requirements/specs/PRDs in Confluence and reference them easily within a JIRA issue.
The only real problem JIRA/Confluence have is being very very slow. They've gotten marginally better over the years, but they're still terribly slow compared to competing offerings.
I actually like JIRA and Confluence and have generally had good experiences using them in multiple companies. One of the main things I like is the integration between the two, and Confluence's concept of spaces so you can have some things publicly facing and other things private, which allows you to use Confluence documentation as user-facing docs, which references JIRA issues directly for known issues, and can write requirements/specs/PRDs in Confluence and reference them easily within a JIRA issue.
The only real problem JIRA/Confluence have is being very very slow. They've gotten marginally better over the years, but they're still terribly slow compared to competing offerings.