[iandanforth]

Jira is pretty cancerous. It will likely lead to hundreds of developer hours wasted on buggy, complex UI, new processes which are put in place because the features exist to support them, and eventually a slide into a multi-atlassian-product cluster of almost-working cruft.

That said you're SOL because you don't have a solid set of tools in place today. I know large, distributed teams who use github effectively for example and they have the processes and cultural inertia to make it work, but it doesn't sound like you've even got a solid home-grown alternative.