What I find the real problem is not JIRA itself, but the fact that most of the time JIRA, is abused up to a point where it's become unusable. The inability or unwillingness (or both?) of the teams I've worked with to structure their work, write good user stories and keep things simple is in my experience the root cause of any shitty JIRA experience I've had. Of course it doesn't help per se that JIRA allows you to do that, but I guess that's not the tool's fault. (You can write bad and good essays with Microsoft Word).