Re: the board thing, Jira has actually been trying to solve this problem for years now with a concept called Simplified Workflows. [1] This allows the project admin to create Statuses and adjust their workflow without needing to get a Jira admin involved. The problem with this approach is that every project does something completely different (often times even multiple teams within a project use different processes) and the people working to do higher level planning can't grok what is going on.
The rules get in your way, but as an entire org, they provide value. A lot of what we do is work with large orgs to actually enforce those rules top down on devs. The difference between our approach and most others is that while we agree with the idea of governance and top down rules, we drive the creation of those rules as a bottom up process. This way the devs get to agree on how they want to work, and as long as there is a degree of consistency, we get to tell management that this is the way forward, and we can now report on things while ensuring we're not getting in the way of the devs.
That's what we tried (our teams are self-organizing, as they are in Scrum, so we couldn't do it another way) but the things the teams wanted had hardly any consistency (partly because the products and projects are very different, partly because of the people).
This is where an experienced consultant can help. We often start with what you're describing here as the baseline, and then work to find a middle ground. I would say that 3/4 times we can find something that works for everyone. And it's ok that sometimes people need different workflows. Some Jira admins or managers trying to pull reports will be upset about this but they can be handled once you demonstrate why doing it this way provides more value to the org as a whole.
The rules get in your way, but as an entire org, they provide value. A lot of what we do is work with large orgs to actually enforce those rules top down on devs. The difference between our approach and most others is that while we agree with the idea of governance and top down rules, we drive the creation of those rules as a bottom up process. This way the devs get to agree on how they want to work, and as long as there is a degree of consistency, we get to tell management that this is the way forward, and we can now report on things while ensuring we're not getting in the way of the devs.
1. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/use-t...