Why no Lookup Field?

[David Loszewski]

Does anyone know why Atlassian has not implemented a lookup field feature?   Before coming to Jira/Confluence I used SharePoint daily and I believe that was one of their strongest features.   The ability to associate data with a field and have it automatically populate and cascade depending on the data that you're looking for.   I know it's possible with calls to an external database but I would think this is a feature that could be easy enough to implement without making everyone go to an external database to fetch the data.   

Just curious...

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi David,

as it is a bit empty here I am trying to chime in. I doubt there will be a definite answer as this comes quite specific to product design questions.
There is a strong ecosystem of App vendors providing Apps enriching Atlassian products - you can find them on marketplace (https://marketplace.atlassian.com).

So, to sum up - yes, it would be awesome to have a lot of functions and fields. On the other hand users would say, "nah, it's a feature overload, where do I start - now I feel lost". So, I think, there is a balance between what is provided out of the box and what you can get from an App vendor. I am fully aware that what one person considers absolutetly needed would not be needed by another one.
I believe this is why decisions like that are hard - and a complicated task to assemble a product, like Jira, that in the end fulfill everybodys need.

Cheers,
Daniel