Why is there no Clone / Duplicate a Project?

[Chad Harlan]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Clone/Copy an entire JIRA project

Why a third-party workaround for something that should be a basic functionality?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The simple answer is that most people don't need cloning of either project setup or copying issues, so Atlassian have not built it in.  By the time enough people had needs for it, third parties had already written add-ons for it, and Atlassian had started to pursue automatic generation of the schemes via templates, so there was still no real need for it in the core product.