You forgot the first step. The rich man invites him with promise of cookies.

I actually like Jira. I have my own workflow where I fetch my tickets via Emacs to Orgmode and then work from there. Integration is read-only but that is what I need 99% of the time.

brave search otoh is pretty gud. I believe they even do their own indexing.

I jumped over to runbox with my custom domain. It costs me ~10€ per year and I had no issues thus far. IMAP works great which hasn’t been the case with gmail so I’m very satisfied.