Why the frown? I've had success with Confluence at 4 or 5 companies. My biggest complaint is the handling of major revisions to a hierarchy of documents but that's something that's probably specific to me.

Confluence is a great fit for business and technical people in my experience.

1) J2EE. Which I suppose is a J2EE complaint, but the sins of the father...

2) Searching performs rather poorly in terms of the quality of results.

3) It's licensed.

4) It doesn't scale if you're doing anything more than a text repository.

5) Jira / Confluence integration is, imho, sub-par given that Atlassian makes them both.

Not an "end of the world, woe is me" story, but still ":("-worthy.

((NB: I haven't used any other wiki software, so it's possible that Confluence is far better than any other option...I hope not))

Yeah slowness is definitely ":("-worthy, but in my experience Confluence performs pretty well. It really depends how it's installed and how the database is setup also.

And the search is weak, I agree, but I haven't experienced any significant problems in scaling or Jira integration. It's also much more pleasant to deal with than SharePoint.

For technical-only teams, I highly recommend MoinMoin. It takes some hands on administration (maybe it's better now, I haven't used it for a couple of years) but it was worth it for the flexibility, plug-ins, and the fact that it stored pages in plain text files.

Nothing sucks more that Confluence - I feel your pain all too well :(