Unfortunately, that's enterprise for you. Basic human logic is often insufficient to handle the demands...
Those applications are absolutely only as good as the time taken to adapt them to the needs at hand and to the team using it.
And +1 for markdown support. There are plugins out there that add that, but... don't get me started on their plugin ecosystem.
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.plug...
I do wish Jira had much more powerful query, and support for deeper dashboard customization. Compared to ClearQuest, Jira is very user friendly, but CQ felt much more powerful.
In the end we just scrapped it all and went with Trello. Yes, it's 'less powerful', but we've found that you don't really need much more. For all the features that Trello 'lacks', it makes up for in speed, simplicity and ease of use.
Oh dear god.
As an employee at a medium sized company that uses Jira and Confluence, I have to disagree.
I'm sure people out there have managed to wrangle and configure Jira into something usable, but it's implementation where I work has been just horrible.
And confluence... Apart from being just slow and unreliable, it's text editor gives me nightmares. I mean, all due respect for building that (it does some pretty powerful and complicated things), but 95% of the time I just want to write an article in Markdown and post it.