I just started using project module to keep track of my own work. It seems like a great tool to coordinate with the people I work with, and provide some visibility to my clients. I've just started to do this, it's still an experiment for me.
But without too much pain I'm using it to track issues. As I understand it better I'll submit issues (and patches) to drupal.org. All this module needs is more users and a little time.
I've tried to make patches for features that our community needs. I got lost in the weeds and finally gave up. IMO, this module needs much more than users and time. It needs a casket. I'd ecourage folks to write a basic ticketing module for Drupal. This would be a good test case for a relations API, since we would want projects => issues relationship and issues => issues relationship (for dependencies/blockers). -moshe