Danny Reed

Disappointing that this isn't available yet.  The lack of this feature limits the ability of Zendesk to support the processes of a business which are often more complex than 3 statuses can describe.  I've worked with other systems in the past and custom statuses allowed us to manage a ticket over it's journey through multiple departments.  

I don't believe that the custom fields are a 1:1 replacement for this as others have mentioned.  Especially since you can't require a value in those.