Well someone at some point requested a search function, maybe a business owner in house or a customer, but regardless they said "no problem fam" and hastily hacked together the monstrosity they've built.

What I'd preferred was if they took the time to implement it correctly from the get go. What they built instead is of no use to anyone. It's a search function in name, but it doesn't provide useful search results.

Search is hard though. From how it's behaving I think they're just sticking the data in Elasticsearch or Lucene or some such, without having done the long and arduous effort of then making it good.

Though my point is that even though confluence has a search function so broken they effectively don't have a search function, they aren't meaningfully bleeding customers over it. Business sales are incredibly sticky that way. Regardless of what pleases me as a user, Atlassian has no real incentive to fix the problem, and evidently hasn't (at least last I checked).

Right, well in my opinion the goal of software development is making users happy. Having no search, or a terrible search, or a hypothetical "correct" search some unknown date in the future doesn't make anybody happy.

Which is why I consider it better to use the tools that I have today to make a feature that is good enough. Rather than cynically leaning on some vendor lock-in to hope the customers stay.

Given that you seem to consider Atlassian's software so crappy, it's a bit confusing that you bring them up as an example of good management? Your advice is basically, write crappy software and don't spend any energy improving it, until you can do so for the minimum cost.

"Correctly" is a spectrum.

Pretty much 0% of users want a hastily implemented search bar that doesn't really work.

I would argue that 0% of users want the world's most perfect search bar, lovingly crafted, that took 2 years to make and went through multiple rounds of gold-plating, and occupied all of the team's time while their competitors expanded their product offering with tons of new features.

Somewhere in the middle there's going to be a distribution of acceptable-ness. I would wager a functional but unimpressive search bar that can be turned around in a few days beats something that's designed to the nines but takes a few months to ship.