interesting.  I hadn't thought about how to get the data from the inputs into the controller for it's use.  Agreed that the other alternative would be exposing "issue" in some form.

One alternative may be to do a $scope.new_issue_fields = {} or something like that to make clear that we are writing to a model that is input to create.  In any case the current code seems fine to me.  Just tossing out some other ideas in case they seem better to you.