Ask HN: Performant and well-designed alternative to Jira?

To me, Jira seems ugly and old (in the bad way - you still rock, George Clooney), reminiscent of an aged and decaying soviet refrigerator but software.

The text is monochromatic and the UI is a bland, cramped, uninteresting, and entirely uncomfortable.

But most of all, it's simply hard to ingest the information contained in a longer ticket, as it all just coagulates into this giant blob of icky text block.

Also, Jira does not support Markdown syntax & styling (boo!!), instead using its own home-baked version which, put gently, is as unappealing as my dog's uneaten breakfast.

I've looked at Trello and Asana, but I'm not sure either of these cut the mustard for a 40 person cross-functional team, comprised of engineering, product, and marketing, who all collaborate together on large and complex software projects.

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi.... is there a New Hope as far as collaboration tools that have pretty UI's, that scale well, and that I can safely suggest to my VP of Engineering without being forced to wear the cone of shame and ridicule?

Or is my future as a dev shackled to the unimaginative ministrations of Atlassian's sickly stonemasons (aka designers)?