I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc.
Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought
Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira
I only mean this all to be fair to Atlassian, that not all issues with Jira derive from anything they’re doing specifically
(this is even granting that AI is a 10x speedup for developers, which I don't agree with and no-one has shown)
This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.
(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?