I think on-prem JIRA (often with some additional DB customisation work) is probably the reason. I've been at a few places where it was hideously slow and flake

I think on-prem JIRA (often with some additional DB customisation work) is probably the reason. I've been at a few places where it was hideously slow and flakey (erroring just after you save a long story edit). In recent years I've mostly used it in SaaS form, or at least very well provisioned. I don't love it, and the UI is clunky (especially the messed-up almost-but-not-quite-markdown or wysi-almost-wyg) but it's usable, widely known, and as you note has some useful integrations. Edit: the hard part - and this has nothing to do with JIRA is getting people to write well-formed stories. I have spent a lot of my professional life fighting to deprecate contentless stories!