I am flabergasted to see that Jira, purporting to be a "Project Management" tool has, after several years, still not grasped what a project actually is. I understand that it might mean different things to different folks but REALLY ! ALL Projects have a START AND END DATE. Look it up on the project management institute site. PLEASE Allow for a status of closed. It is unusable in its present form regardless of whether you feel you have a large number of adopters of your Jira product. ITS pretty SIMPLE- PROJECTS CLOSE ! Allow users to mark them as closed without going through the manual and amateur nonsense you are proposing.