With the 18.1 release, users will have the ability to add issues directly to iterations without converting them to tasks and manage issues on the storyboard.
What about for Kanban boards? It looks like they still need to be converted to either a story or a task in order to display in the backlog or on the board.
And coming from a request que - users submit a request that is an issue. This could go directly to a team using a Kanban board, and they would be able to assign an issue directly without converting to a project / task - this would be a much more efficient flow for small / quick turn type requests.
The ability to add them to a Kanban board would be highly beneficial! I'm not sure about issues going directly to the kanban, but with current functionality you can assign an Agile team in the queue topic's routing rule. This will automatically send it to their backlog. For Kanban teams it'd be a huge benefit to be able to review and prioritize these issues relative to ongoing stories they have.
With the 19.1 release, we have added issues to the Kanban board. The functionality is the same as what is available on the Scrum board. Kanban teams can now add issues directly to their Kanban board and manage them with the rest of their team's work.
We actually stopped using the queues and are just assigning the story to the agile team directly. We built a custom notification so the "requester" gets an email when the story is completed and we also built a report so they can "follow" when the story is moved into the interation to be worked on. We were in the same boat as you - it was just too painful and too many clicks to convert