Agree.  We need more flexibility hierarchies, with children being able to link to grandparents, skipping parents, if necessary.  

This request gets my vote

Dear all,
I would like to inform you that this issue in the project JPOSERVER is being migrated to the new project JSWSERVER. Your votes and comments will remain unchanged.
Our team at Atlassian will continue to monitor this issue for further updates, so please feel free to share your thoughts or feedback in the comments.
Sincerely,
Aakrity Tibrewal
Jira DC

Absolutely agree with this ask and the frustrations of different business users. Our teams have projects that both need the simple hierarchy needs to be linked to an initiative highest level, but do not need the middle. This also makes us create "fake" levels with no added value. It actually confuses people and takes unnecessary space in the plan for those simpler project plans and teams. I can't simplify the hierarchy because I do have projects that really need that hierarchy distinction. This would be super beneficial in cloud.

To have the ability to skip hierarchy would be ideal given not all issue types will be setup as a program or project and would be great to setup a Initiative, or Project issue and be able to add a story or task directly to it.

For our users this feature of Roadmaps makes roadmaps extremely cumbersome. Instead we use Structure and linking for it's more flexible heirachies. Every time we have teams try to adopt roadmaps, this inflexibility is the problem that users can't get past (with many teams over many years). Users just don't accept "to do what you want you're going to need to add 2 or 3 fake issues in the tree just for linking to work. And use with Structure to drag/drop issues throws validation errors that most users just don't understand what to do to correct, especailly those used to quickly and flexibly dragging and dropping issues around a WBS while defining the project. For now we've given up promoting Roadmaps to our users. We're reconsider it if this feature were implemented. If it were still an optional product we wouldn't be paying for it on our last renewal. I can't be clearer that this one inflexibility essentially kills the product for us. One alternative would be to allow Roadmaps to use parent/child links to find the hierachy to work with, the other would be to relax the constraints on Parent Link to allow for flexible linking.