It does a good enough job for studio photography with clear subjects and plain backgrounds. But fails miserably if the background is multicolour and/or contain too many objects.
The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.
There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/
For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/
For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda
Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.
As for Jira general slowness, bug your instance's admin to run maintenance cleanups and purges more often particularly if you run a large shared instance. It won't solve the problem entirely, but might help depending on your instance size and typical usage.
Having clear baseline practices will help too, but don't go overboard and come up with dozens of rules. Keep it intuitive so that they quickly become second-nature, and not points of contention and friction.
HNLondon run until at least 2018[1] and were well organised IMO. The speakers line up were mostly very interesting. And some of the recordings of the talks are still available at https://vimeo.com/hnlondon
If I'm not mistaken the organisers of HNLondon in its final years were Dmitri Grabov[2] and Stevie Buckley[3].
One recurring issue that I recall was the typical audience member trying to hijack Q&A to promote stuff - i.e. "can I ask a question?" then proceeds to make a comment and pitch their product instead. But that's not isolated to HNLondon.
PS: Big shoutout to Dmitri and Stevie for the awesome events that they put together back in the day.
Until I joined a team that didn’t find cli as fun and preferred GUI tools. And that’s when I found mailcatcher. It’s solid and just works.