We set up our Board and Workflow fairly minimal. Which is probably why I don't have any problems with Jira.
> And "transitions are impossible by default and only possible if enabled by the admin" is a uniquely bad Jira-ism that other tools in this space don't have
What do you mean by that? The default Workflow in Jira is that all Issues can transition into any status.
The default workflow in some newer editions has a transition that allows that yes. But custom workflows don't have those transitions unless and until an admin manually adds them. If the person who set up the workflow didn't think of some edge case, you're SOL.
Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things.
Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status it also has the "Any" transition. If that is different in your workflows then that is a deliberate decision.
I've never been able to edit the workflow, except at one company where I had access to the "beta" Jira but not the "real" one. This is across, like, five or six different companies - again, if it were one company I'd say it's a bad decision by that company, but the fact that it's so consistently done this way tells me it's something about the tool.
> Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status it also has the "Any" transition. If that is different in your workflows then that is a deliberate decision.
Wasn't the case as recently as 2020 (the last time I had access to create my own custom workflow, and I'm pretty sure that was a newer version of Jira than many large companies are using). Are you using the cloud version or something?
What I wanted to get across is that Jira makes it very easy to give control to the Team that is using a specific Board or Workflow. If your company don't trust their Teams with that then that is a failure of the company and not a failure of Jira.
Jira certainly seems to push people towards having a handful of manager users who are the only ones who can create boards/transitions or adjust which fields are mandatory, and this leads to bad behaviour - if only one VIP can create boards, they'll probably create 20 once and then never create another. "Title is all that's required" may be the default in some editions of Jira today but it certainly isn't widely used. And "transitions are impossible by default and only possible if enabled by the admin" is a uniquely bad Jira-ism that other tools in this space don't have - there may be occasional use cases where you need e.g. an action that's impossible to undo, but it's an awful default.