Hi @Mark Hansens and welcome to the Community!
I did not develop JQL and it goes back more than 20 years, so it won't be easy to try and share "the" reasoning behind JQL.
A couple of things might help, such as:
- text fields (like summary or description) don't support '=' search. You will mainly see '~' as an operator in those cases.
- 'IN' is used if you want to combine multiple options in a list. It can work as an alternative to 'OR' and as such it allows you to write Project in (ProjectA, ProjectB, ProjectC), which is significantly shorter and easier than "Project = ProjectA OR Project = ProjectB OR Project = ProjectC" although both will give you the same results.
- It looks as if option fields can only be searched with (NOT) IN, which probably is to cater for scenarios where you can select multiple options. Cascading select and checkbox fields e.g. are such fields.
- Sprint functions like openSprints(), futureSprints(), closedSprints() by default assume that multiple options are returned.
- The SLA example completed() only allows you to select '=' or '!=' simply because this only can be one of the two options: the SLA cycle is completed or it is not. There are no other options there.
As a recommendation, just try to think about what these functions are designed to do. Once you're there, the operators tend to make sense.
Hope this helps!
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