I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.
As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me. There's so much focus on 'control' that I feel like a victim every time I use it. For example, if I want to move a card from In Progress to the Backlog, Jira has an option to restrict the non-anointed from moving cards. So I have to get 'permission' from someone with the right privileges to move a card. Jira is a micro-manager's wet dream.
Trello was the anti-Jira and that's what made it great.
Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.
Most things in our JIRA deployment are configured to just allow anyone to change anything, with only a few exceptions.
Locking things down like that is the project manager's way of making sure people are constantly blocked and work isn't getting done. Not sure why some project manager's try so hard to create this state of affairs.
These can be ignored, used to enforce very simple house-keeping things like filling out a "fix version" or "deploy date" when closing an issue as "fixed", or to exactly codify all the rules in a complex development process based on a bunch of flowcharts someone with "project manager" in their credentials spent two weeks painstakingly creating.
[1] What word you choose here will probably depend on if a PM or developers have admin access in JIRA.
