>I.e. I'm not sure the argument can be made that this is Atlasassian's fault.

As someone who spends a lot of his work life administering Jira and Confluence, I disagree. The problem is that these products try to be everything to everyone and as a result users have a massive degree of freedom with what to do and how to order things.

With that amount of freedom you just have a bunch of end users, many of them non-technical, who have no idea how they are SUPPOSED to use it. Especially because they don't want to spend a lot of time learning the right way to use the tools. They have a bunch of other things to do and just need to interact with this tool to complete their current task and then move on.

You are right, a sort of Wiki-Master would help. But, at least in my organization, we don't even have enough capacity to do all the basic administrative tasks required like setting up projects, workflows, custom fields, screens, etc. We can't also manage the content inside. The users are on their own in that regard.

If you are not willing to hire stuff with the sole purpose of managing the content of your Jira and Confluence instances, a more opiniated, rigid product is probably a lot better for your organization.

> If organizations using Confluence had at least one full time "Wiki Master" position or the like (with resp. superpowers), this wouldn't have to be like that.

I think part of the challenge is finding and retaining this person. It takes a fairly unique kind of person to want/enjoy a (let's be honest) thankless job like managing and maintaining a huge corporate wiki.

Finding good tech writers or information science professionals has always been a difficult task in any company I've been at.

Documentation and wiki writing ends up being side-of-desk work for someone else, and so of course it never gets maintained.

I feel like the only benefit of Confluence over any other wiki-like product is the ability to tag users and link to Jira issues.

What is their fault is how slow it is.