[andreimackenzie]

Agreed. Jira makes it easy to add a new field, plugin, or workflow step for a particular use case, but it is much more difficult to determine if an existing field/plugin/workflow step can be safely removed. As a result, everyone is afraid to touch it, projects accumulate cruft over the years, and it degrades the entire workflow. The problem is especially bad if there is shared ownership of JIRA, and therefore everyone feels empowered to add, but nobody feels responsible for the dirty work to clean up the mess from time to time.

My company had resisted the urge to bolt on additions more than most. We recently migrated from Cloud to on-prem Server as a result of being acquired, and it is amazing how much zippier our project is compared to some of the peer projects that have accumulated cruft.