"bad" by itself doesn't mean much; the important thing is the relative goodness.
What were open source projects going to us instead? RequestTracker? Scarab? Bugzilla?
All of those were much worse than JIRA for development.
RT is fine for helpdesks but ugly as hell and no integration with SCMs.
Scarab never got to a satisfactory level of maturity.
Bugzilla? Just say no.
I've been a JIRA admin for 5 years now, and we seriously considered Fogbugz as well. I've never regretted our decision even though we've had plenty of issues() with JIRA.
