I find it helpful to stop thinking of JIRA as a bug tracker or anything like that. In my opinion JIRA is more of a way to create and track workflows. It can be used as a blank slate for quite a lot of things (which I cannot come up with any examples for at the moment!)

That being said, because it can do anything, it doesn't take much effort to make a workflow as painful as possible. Somebody with the "right" mind might make all kinds of checkpoints in a workflow, which makes a lot of operations a pain in the ass because you wind up hopping through a bunch of steps. Pretty sure in our org we just make our workflow "you can hop from any state to any other state"--basically a free-for-all.

Dunno my point, but there you go!