Engineers are not the customer, the executives of companies willing to sign off on the license fees are, they're the only ones they need to keep happy.
In fairness to Atlassian I work for a charity and we get to use their products for next to nothing and I've found Jira to be a valuable project management tool.
My experience is that dev's have...mixed feelings about it because it can get in the way of "actual work" but only a few of those dev's are as good and organised as they think they are. The rest it's like herding cats and without Jira or an equivalent they'd be churning out dogshit.
It’s interesting that as a dev my feeling about PM’s is more or less the same. Transforming the garbage in Jira tickets into something resembling a product is a challenge.
I've worked with some large Jira installations and I don't remember ever running into 10s page loads without a broken VPN/internet connection. This sounds like a very very broken setup.
My company uses Confluence (NOT self hosted) and it regularly takes 10s or more to load a page on a 400Mbit connection. Text content only, no diagrams. Confluence is a joke
