You find honesty a little odd?

That's quite odd.

Too often some manager asks for (and is given) admin access and starts “improving” things.

Sure, anybody can create custom fields and screens and slap together a janky “workflow”, but well-oiled Jira Ops prevent an explosion of custom fields, they curate the create, browse and edit screens of each issue type to only show the fields that are important at that stage, use custom screens on workflow transitions along with validators and conditions to help ensure an issue is always in a reasonable state, etc. Then users don’t complain about the tooling.

But Jira governance takes time, effort, discussions with stakeholders, etc. And without it Jira gets a bad rap.

That’s the real trick.

The combinatorial of interactions between many features will inevitably create unresolvable edge-cases that need to be patched over, either hidden away or by tacking on more complexity so the user can control how these edge-cases should be solved for their own workflow.

There is no way to do such design upfront, you can only upfront what you can think and reason about. That's how all projects start, and their demise is exactly from realising "oh, we don't cover this flow, maybe we should have a feature for that". Taking all these learnings and applying to a new system that has more design upfront starts to verge on Second System problem.

Linux is also full of cruft, it's good enough but I don't think you should live with the impression that is a benchmark of software quality. It's still impressive but as any complex system it has many issues from legacy.

One of the big benefits of a physical kanban board is that the limited space means people only write down the stuff they really care to keep track of. For me it has never resulted in people forgetting anything important. It means they don't write down the unimportant stuff.

It's possible that some people would write down a lot of trivia or fantasy features, especially to start. The best response to that is to let them write the cards and then sort them according to actual priorities. But I've never seen anybody persist in that behavior very long. If they do, I think it's a sign of organization problems that tools can at best mask, never fix.

I think this can also be true of virtual kanban boards (e.g., GitHub's kanban view) if you keep people focused on the kanban view. Then they learn to focus on what's being worked on and the near-term to-do list. You can have a backlog column and let people fill it up as much as they want, but as long as you groom the top 20 cards or so to be your actual current priorities, people eventually adapt.

If I understand it correctly it moves the signaling in-band so it can be handled at a locally distributed level, that is, each local parts consuming system is responsible for directly signaling it's upstream supplier to provide more parts and this is done by putting the signals on the parts bins or making the parts bins themself the signals.

I guess there is also that weird software logistics thing that appropriated the kanban term but because software logistics is very different from manufacturing logistics has little to do with actual kanban. shrugs. It's probably still a backpressure signaling thing however.