Actually - I agree with you about Jira not being an enterprise solution - it's fundamental flaw (and I'm being 70% serious here) is that it's a $10K package that can be set up in 10 minutes in a market where enterprise tools like Remedy go for $750K + a couple headcount (that usually cost $75K-$125K/year depending on your geography) and took us 3 months to do an out-of-the-box-no-customization ITIL deployment. I also agree with you that it's probably perceived as being weak on the SOX/Audit standards.

But some of your comments are describing features of an SCM "managing changesets", "tracking codebase" - TFS/Serena are full fledged SCM suites - and, I'll agree with you right now, they are definitely perceived as enterprise worthy systems.

But Jira is a lightweight issue tracker. It can link issues to an SCM (and indeed, fisheye/crucible are great additions that we use to connect to perforce) - but, at it's heart, it's an issue tracker.

Re: Workflow - Yes - could be more sophisticated. In particular, last time I tried, I couldn't find a way to (easily) gate an issue with multiple voters - that is, if I had an issue that required approval by five departments before it could move to the next stage - couldn't do it in Jira, and that's a pretty common use case for Workflow - so they have a ways to go. With that said - there are workarounds - JRA-10042 was a way of delivering equivalent functionality. Also - The 4.4 Visual Workflow Designer is elegant (and included in the base package of Jira)

Re: Meaningless Reporting - Problem is, what one person's "Meaningless report" is another person's "Must have" feature.

But, the overall theme of your comment, that Jira is not a heavy weight enterprise product - is accurate. It's functional, fast, and has a beautiful interface, and, for $12,000 for the unlimited user Greenhopper+jira package, is basically being given away for free to companies, and, at $10 for a 10 user license - is for all intents and purposes, free for individuals.

I've thought long and hard about this, and (to bring this back on track) - I've decided that Jira is such a beautiful product, is so elegant, and is so versatile, precisely because Atlassian _doesn't_ charge very much for it and doesn't have sales people or "Technical Account Managers" - large corporations paying seven or eight figures for software, expect to have some ability to influence the feature set, and, if you just charged someone $10mm+ for a product, you feel somewhat obligated to do so. And so your software ends up being this huge crappy enterprise system that yes, is fully SOX compliant, and is completely ITIL certified - but honestly - is just an absolute mess.

I'll state my position: I don't think there is a commercial issue tracker that I've seen, that can track issues, as effectively and beautifully, as Jira can, at any price.