[CraigJPerry]

JIRA is just a tool. A pretty reasonable one. It integrates with every dev tool under the sun at this point. It’s as lightweight, or invasive, as you want it to be.

Sometimes there’s people or workflow problems that get blasted as jira (or rally/ac) problems because that’s the interface you see those people or workflow problems through.

[AstralStorm]

Nah, generally the point 1 stands. JIRA has potent top down customization tools that are easy to misuse, e.g. adding required fields, task types priorities or defining task flow.

Just that information overload can make working with it a real pain.

These can easily break its own features e.g. scrum or kanban boards or backlogs, which are configured separately.

And the dev or project lead typically does not have access to directly customize it, because JIRA ACLs are way too broad or company has a top down policy on it.

On top of that, it has rather weak support for default values...

Email notifications are also not exactly customizable by the user. It's worse at that front than bugzilla even.

One thing that was sort of customizable are the frontend report views. Shows for whom the app is made - beancounters.