Story points represent complexity, not difficulty. We also aim for a certain amount of story points per sprint. After 13 we leave the Fibonacci sequence and just double them. The entire team must vote on story points simultaneously to avoid affecting each other’s opinions, then must discuss the votes until we agree on a number. Stories that have sat too long in the backlog need re-pointing. Voting is now done with post-its in Miro, just to be modern.

Things are sometimes stories, sometimes epics, and sometimes tasks or sub tasks. No one knows why, nor have they found a good way to integrate them all into The Workflow.

At some places, any story higher than 5 gets split, an Epic is created and the 2 (or more) new stories are added to the new epic. I really don't get the online disdain for JIRA unless it's Microsoft employee astroturfers, almost as bad as Jetbrains and Red Hat astroturfers.

Ah, that explains why I keep being asked to split a complex feature into pointless pieces that don’t stand alone. No wonder we need so many team hours in sprint planning, to keep track of them all.

No system is perfect for sure. It's a rule of thumb. If it doesn't fit then stick with the really large story that simply cannot be broken down into manageable chunks but it should be a super rare corner case that some piece of work is so huge yet atomically consistent that there is absolutely no human way to break it down, at all, in any way shape or form.

Do you spend more time setting up Jira or building the product? There is a balance somewhere.

I ignore the Agile/Jira stuff, as much as I can.