Some of the exciting things for this new issue tracking system are:

- As users, you are able to exercise your power to vote for the bugs/features that are important to you. This means that we (the developers) can see which issues are most important to our user base and fix/implement them first.
It also gives users a reason to not create duplicate bugs, since if you add your weight to a pre-existing bug report, then it is more likely to be repaired than if there were multiple single reports of the same bug. Lets face it, duplicate bugs waste a lot of time that we could all be spending actually doing real work.

- It's a dedicated, commercial issue tracking system. Trac was pretty good as an all-in-one repository viewer, development wiki and source browser; I really don't want to knock it too badly, but I felt it was a bit lacking in it's issue tracking usability, a bit more lacking in it's search and reporting capability, and a lot lacking in it's ability to handle multiple projects. With Jira however, we get an issue tracker that is (from what I've seen so far) really really powerful, configurable, extensible and usable.

- Crucible has source code review capabilities , which means that we can ensure every single line of code that has been committed to our projects has been double checked by someone else on the team. As an end user, this should excite you as well, because not only does this mean less bugs in the end product, but also less chance of a rogue coder placing some malicious code in the addon that could do some nasty things like delete your purples, or mail off all your gold to a random user somewhere.
This up-until-now hasn't been a real problem, but with the release of advanced's modular architecture, all sorts of people are seeing the possibilities that are available to them now, and want to write their own stats or utility modules. This means we're seeing unprecedented growth of our development team, and the number of projects being made available.
Obviously, it's not possible for you to perform code reviews of every single addon or module that you install. And even if you do like to do this kind of tedious task you should be able to review the code for everyone, by making your own crucible review (once you ask for and we grant you access, that is).

- The one really sweet thing about Trac, was it's source view. It was the one thing that sold me, even over it's other deficiencies. But Fisheye takes all that Trac did superbly, and takes it up another notch again, giving you high level overview of the repository that you never dreamed possible. Branch visualization, Directory filters, Advanced searching, Annotation views, Changelogs, RSS feeds, Activity graphs... It's all very enticing!

Anyhow, I hope you'll all take the time to investigate the new system, and embrace it's differentness as a positive thing, rather than just something else you'll have to learn to use. I think it will have a real positive impact on our ability to produce some of the finest addon code around.