JIRA Templates Out of Date

The email template velocity variables $constantsManager and $projectManager point to com.atlassian.jira.config.ConstantsManager and  com.atlassian.jira.project.ProjectManager, both of which have a substantial number of methods that are deprecated in v4.0 and there's no way to access the new methods indended to replace them. This means, for example, that there's no way to get the components for a project.

The Release Note template is so out of date it doesn't match your basic meta data. Tasks and Subtasks are both included outside of the issue types they're tied to. The release notes template doesn't even have the velocity variables available in the email templates. Customizing the template is virtually impossible in any meaningful way unless you have access to the source code for the ReleaseNoteManager class. In particular, there's no way to iterate over issues by issue type and then by component or vice versa. There's no way to create a set, rather than a list, so that components can be sorted per issue type. Basically, the template is unusable out of the box and impossible to customize without access to the source code.

By not allowing an automated way to produce release notes, you are literally costing your customers thousands of manhours a year. Each release requires someone to extract the relevant data and reformat it. Consider the frustration of using a software product that requires you to cut and paste fields and reformat for every release, rather than simply allowing you to export the information in a reasonable way.
The reason you don't get many votes for release note issues is because the individuals likely to have accounts with JIRA are mostly developers and not technical writers. Despite that, there is a clear trail of individuals trying to figure out how to do this over a number of years in your development forums - and failing. This seems like a feature that would take a minimum of time to fix, and be very appreciated by the customers.