Their pricing model is different, which I think keeps the base feature-set neutered. They try to up-sell you to JIRA and Confluence, which disincentives them from improving the base tools, IMO.

Yes, the pricing model is different with the goal of making Bitbucket affordable for individual developers and small teams, no matter whether they work on public or private projects.

Do we want people to use JIRA? If they require more than simple issue tracking, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we aren't improving the base tools.

For example, Bitbucket already provides the ability to vote for issues and recently added rendering of the CONTRIBUTING.md file for pull requests (http://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request-guidelines...).

IMHO it's the code search (which they've been planning for months now)

We haven't been planning it for months, we've been working on it for months. It's a big project to implement search at the scale of Bitbucket.