To use your analogy, if I am selling cars that are incredibly cheap, safe, reliable and comfortable, and people are buying my car over other cars that smell like rainbows and unicorns, there probably is some unique value I'm providing here.
Since we're talking about startups, if I were to make a decision I would rather focus the hell out of my strength than trying to invest my limited resources in improving my weakness.
Also, "smell like wet dog" is a bit too extreme analogy don't you think? For most people I think Github issues is good enough. It would be more like "doesn't have the best scent ever but it's good enough"
I know for a fact that a lot of fortune 100 companies are switching their code hosting from Atlassian Stash to Github, at the price of losing tight integration between issues and code, not to mention all the headaches involved in switching. I think it's a matter of time before Github comes out with a better issue tracking system and everyone jumps ship.
Github shouldn't focus on making issues better, for the same reason why Github is eating Jira.
Like OP observed, Github is eating despite their investment in issues. If issues was a stronger pulling factor the opposite should be happening.
Which means, Github should invest their time and energy more on code side instead of issues. Improving issues will be definitely better but is not the crucial factor.
I think it's because the "issues" are ephemeral whereas the code and the community around the code has significantly greater value.
Since we're talking about startups, if I were to make a decision I would rather focus the hell out of my strength than trying to invest my limited resources in improving my weakness.
Also, "smell like wet dog" is a bit too extreme analogy don't you think? For most people I think Github issues is good enough. It would be more like "doesn't have the best scent ever but it's good enough"