Yeah, hatred mostly because Jira is the grand enabler of micromanagers and corporate accountability and a bit slow.

It can be whatever people want to use it for. The customisation and the key features of the tool are not bad. Then again, most tools are neutral until a person wields them.

[Edit typo]

Jira is heaven compared with Excel sheets, or half backed task management done by Summer interns than many of us have suffered with.

I have endured all, from web forms storing their data via Perl CGI scripts to Excel sheets which require a PhD in VBA macros to change anything.

True, those solutions are always horrible. Still don't like Jira that much. Every corp somehow managed to slow that system down to a crawl that using it became a pain.

Still a great fan of Trac. Old but gold, simple and fast. Suffers a bit from a historical focus on SVN, but can be adapted to git easily.

There's a consensus in hating Jira, but nobody could ever agree on a suitable alternative.

I get that Jira can be poorly configured, but it's not Lotus Notes bad.

Jira is not bad per se, people use it like a generic CMS, and it also can be one, and that creates problems.