Ilie Andriuta: Sorry for the late reply, this Jira somehow didn't notify my about you comments, even though I'm reporter and listed as watcher.

I need to debug if it's just a misconfiguration in my user profile here, or a problem with my mail server, or a problem with the notification mails from this Jira.

I also think that the placeholder text is helpful - however many applications I know which use such "hint texts" don't actually treat these as real entered texts. They display the text in the text box, often in a lighter shade than "real" text and will internally treat the text box as "empty" until the user actually entered something. The hint will also automatically disappear as soon as the user clicks into the box, no need to "delete" this text.

Here's a screenshot from the Firefox adressbar which is one (but not the only one by far) example: