I just spent 2 days changing descriptions on a bunch of fields in our JIRA environment which would have only taken about an hour if the Descriptions in the Field Configurations had the ability to inherit the descriptions from the parent field. This is currently very misleading when it allows you to create a description on the field itself, but once the field is created, any changes to the description need to be done in each Field Configuration.

I would suggest supplying a checkbox in the Edit view for the field in the Field Configuration which will allow you to inherit the description from the parent field. Then, when viewing the field information on the global level, have a little dropdown of sorts, like you do for Field Configurations Shared by projects, but have it list all the Field Configurations which do NOT inherit the description from the parent field.

This will make it extremely easy to manage these descriptions in the future for massive changes.

Example of the massive change that we had to do: We have a Engineering specific Help document on our SharePoint environment, and the location of the document changed. So i had to go through and change every single instance that used that link to the new URL. It took an extremely long time to do.