Jira is complex but no one needs that complexity. Jira is built to sell to executives, not for anyone to actually use. Executives need to know that they'll be tracking their employees time down to the second with Jira.
But then they're never going to look at the UI for Jira either because they're too busy for that.
I'm not gonna defend Jira. I don't like it. But this is the same thing people like to say about Office. It turns out that the 80/20 rule (80% of users only use 20% of features) never guarantees that even 50% use the _same_ 20%. You need to implement a lot more of Jira's complexity than you might think to get a significant part of Jira's market share.
(Slack is another good example. Slack is "just" an IRC client with better emoji/GIF support. But I'll be damned if Microsoft Teams doesn't _really suck_, even with the benefit of knowing how Slack does everything. Good software is hard and takes work.)
> I'm not gonna defend Jira. I don't like it. But this is the same thing people like to say about Office. It turns out that the 80/20 rule (80% of users only use 20% of features) never guarantees that even 50% use the _same_ 20%. You need to implement a lot more of Jira's complexity than you might think to get a significant part of Jira's market share.
Trello was the counterexample: it implemented less than 20% of Jira's features and was all the more useful for it. (thus Atlassian bought it and have started ruining it with bloat).
But then they're never going to look at the UI for Jira either because they're too busy for that.