Using "themes" for grouping User Stories in JIRA Scrum ?

[Deleted user]

Is it true that Atlassian is phasing out built-in support for Themes?

I want to find out how many people actively use "Themes" as a collection concept for grouping User Stories in Scrum. 

I think of a Theme as a collection object type that has its own set of properties and methods.   Michael Cohn and other scrum gurus say that Themes in Scrum are used to group together related User Stories below the Epic level. 

My organization decided not to use themes in JIRA because they said that all User Stories can be grouped with Epics instead of Themes.  More practically they said that Atlassian has decided to phase out built-in support for Themes, so it is not worth investing in. 

Themes seem like a good idea to batch together User Stories that have natural "set", hierarchical, or network relationships to one another, (like requirements groups or categories in requirements engineering.)   It is another architectural concept for loosely bundling related stories. 

I realize that an important goal in Scrum keeping User Stories "independent" of one another, but oftentimes "atomic" user stories and requirements are often part of a larger molecular or cellular "whole" architecture, so forcing them to be independent can be unnatural or chaotic like shattering a stained glass window.  

So my question is three part: 

1) Are Themes taken out of JIRA and no longer supported collection object types?

2) Does your organization actively use Themes now?  

3) Do you use them in JIRA?  Is so, how? 

[Lori Hamilton]

I too need to be able to group my epics into Themes. I'm not a super advanced user, so I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this without having to rework all my existing Epics. Is there a level available above Epics? Or is there a good plug-in for this that isn't super expensive or is free? I searched the boards and the only things I can find seem several years old.