I'm shocked this hasn't been addressed. No one instinctively expects ENTER to add a newline and some magical empty line they can't even see of easily delete. Since the dawn of computing the expectation of pressing ENTER is getting one newline. This is very poor UI design.

Most people don't know they can press SHIFT+ENTER to achieve this effect in the RTE. It's not discoverable.

To me, this is the main problem. The actual design is great, once you know it. I disliked the new editor passionately, until I learned this.. and now I love it! 

Can we get creative and just think of a simple way to make this behaviour more discoverable for the average user? Knowledge is power, and it should also be a lot more cost-effective!

I would love this feature. Unfortunate.

Closed Won't Fix.

So the most likely scenarios are:

• someone in product or development strongly likes this feature and thinks that people who don't are idiots
  OR
• the code is written so poorly that it makes what should be a relatively small change into an expensive fix

So we have two likely possibilities:

1. Someone's pride is more important than user satisfaction
2. This is a poorly written product

Either way this does not reflect well on Atlassian

Reopen this issue. This is profoundly annoying. The Jira interface in general is getting more cluttered and bulky by default. Please stop making our jobs harder, and please stop making it so difficult to change simple interface issues like these. If I had it my way, we'd be looking for an alternative to Jira right now.

I found out that the right click paste as plain text (ctrl+shift+v) option does exactly what people want, pasting with single lines.
Note that the keyboard macro ctrl+shift+v will paste double lines. 

the keyboard macro =/= right click option macro. Another case of it's not a bug it's a feature.
I hope this helps other people. 

My gosh, agreed.  Amazingly annoying.

I have just started to use confluence and this is REALLY annoying that this can't be part of the formatting.

How hard would it be given that it's already in the background code.  All Confluence would need to do is provide an option to adjust down to 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 2.0 etc.

I think it's a really poor feature to ignore and "not fix".

I am not sure what you mean by the behavior being difficult to implement.  At least in the Atlassian Jira context, removing the entire editing control and replacing it with a simple html edit control would offer far superior usability and would be simple both from a maintenance and initial implementation perspective.  Any "correct" version should use that as a minimum acceptable baseline.

And by the way, in the Jira comment context, shift-enter and insert wiki markup are not options.  I would be thrilled if the problem could be solved as easily as that.

This behavior is poor UI. Atlassian chooses to burden users with editing each line (from copy & paste) and have clairvoyance that Shift-Enter is the magic keystroke. So much about content-management and editing is the final appearance; Atlassian's logic on this issue is obtuse.

A better solution would be to standardize the behavior no matter how text is entered and then direct users on how to adjust the Paragraph line spacing in the CSS. Atlassian demonstrates again why upgrading bodes more penalty than gain.