Do some of your users need the $99 Ultimate plan, and GitLab salespeople couldn't meet you at workable pricing for your users who mostly only need to use Issues?
I can show you plenty of repos where people do silly things with Github and Gitlab tickets in a quest to better track all the work that will never get done.
I'm aware of some systems that try to tack issue tracking onto Git in a similar way to Fossil, but they just aren't as good as a proper issue tracker.
That said, Jira is a terrible issue tracker. I do not understand how it is so bad given that it is literally its only job.
I used Phabricator for issue tracking in my previous company and it was so far ahead of Jira... It makes no sense.
Something as basic as parent/child issues is barely implemented in Jira. You can only have 2 levels of hierarchy.
You can't put a task in your sprint unless it matches the task filter for that sprint, which means you can't easily track the work of people that work on multiple projects.
You can't even put tasks from multiple projects into one sprint. Realistically you should have a single project for everything.
They haven't even got basic stuff like "refresh the page when information on it changes" working.
And that's before you even get to the core flaw of Jira which is that it encourages product managers to overcomplicate it.
But just because Jira is awful doesn't mean issue trackers in general are. Phabricator's is great. GitHub and Gitlab are basic but decent. I haven't got experience with any others but I'm sure there are great ones.
You get 3 levels if you include Epic (Epic > Task > Subtask).
You can set up a sprint/kanban board filter to cover multiple projects, so this does actualy gives you multiple projects per sprint.
I do agree that it's slow and doesn't update itself to reflect changes.
The two groups of people who hate Jira the most are (1) those who can't get it to work how they want it to and (2) those who have to deal with someone else's mad/broken custom workflow.
We appear to have four levels of grouping above "Epic", albeit none of them are even visible in our sprints.
Indeed but that's still an artificial limitation, and subtasks are not really fully featured tasks.
A client of mine decided to ditch Jira last year. Now what they do is use a much simpler system but with a ton of manual wrangling going on constantly. Lots of duplication across boards, most tickets are in the wrong state, nobody knows who's supposed to be handling any given task. I'm mostly trying to stay away from it.
Your theory works if there are only developers, and they are all competent. Throw the usual mix non-dev staff into the mix along with the and it's a mess.
