[pyrophane]

Strongly agree. JIRA can be made to work a lot of different ways, and by allowing managers to restrict the workflow in various ways they can use it to enforce a lot of cumbersome process.

Alternately, JIRA as a team board, particularly with remote teams, can be pretty great if you take the time to set it up so that it works for the team (rather than just for the managers or PMs). It can be no more (or at least not much more) cumbersome than Trello, but has a lot of features that Trello lacks.