Thanks for the feedback and glad to hear that Atlassian is working on the UI aspects for a simpler user experience. As a new user coming over from Track, Mantis, Asana, and PivotalTracker, I love JIRA and see the power in it, but of all of those, it is definitely the most complex in terms of different ways to do similar tasks. It is so overly complex, I couldn't recommend it for any team that doesn't need all of its power. As general feedback to you guys, I'd suggest that you focus on consistency in how users enter or set data so that when a user knows how to do 1 thing, they know how to do everything similar. Strive to identify similarities where possible so that you achieve this, reducing the number of different steps users must learn down to the minimum.
The 3 separate edit views for an issue, each with different fields editable and a different view, is a great example of over-complexification. Continuing with this one problem with the issue screens is the tabs and "Add Tab" button for setting them up on the Configure Screen page. I saw those and thought, "Cool, I can use those to group fields for our users. I'll put the most common fields on the first tab, and relegate other fields that not everyone will need to other tabs." But then it turns out that the tabs don't even appear anywhere else! Why are there tabs there in the admin section, but not on the view in the Issue editor available to non-admin users? It appears the tabs serve no purpose but to help the administrator adding fields to organize them a bit for editing. Unless I'm missing something, this is just silly – you have added a feature for the admin (every new feature adds some complexity, which might be OK if it's also adding a function users need), but denied it from the users, which creates confusion for the admin who set it up (did I do it wrong? are tabs only visible in the admin view?). Since the tabs don't actually appear anywhere else (or if they do, how to activate this is not clear), don't even offer this as an option.
The tab issue is not to suggest a specific tab function, but rather to highlight that there is sort of another completely separate view for working with issue screens in addition to 3 I noted earlier – this oddball tab view only usable by admins in the admin section.
The whole UI is fraught with these kinds of weird inconsistencies.
Any progress on the item?