I'm not a betting man. However, I'd bet you 25 cents that your users will have a much easier time learning how to use Drupal with the interface I've designed below:

WHY? 

This interface is superior to the drupal defaults for a couple key reasons:

1. We can assume that if someone is using your website, they are already familiar, and comfortable with this type of navigation. Nearly every desktop program, from Firefox, to MS Word, to Photoshop, to Explorer, to the Macintosh Finder use this UI pattern. Always seek to design interfaces which your users will already be familiar with.

Today, I spent quite a bit of time wandering drupal's menu system in search of answers. But instead, I uncovered two techniques which made me rethink the questions I was asking. As the latter sentence suggested, I'm a professional writer of fortune cookies on the side (there aren't many of us left...).

 Firstly, we have a very simple technique of locating any menu item (works best with large trees, like "administration", "settings") that exists in the user, node, or admin interface. For me, at least, exploring these techniques has really begun to shift my thinking on the relationship between theming and menus.

I'm probably just tired, but I have this vision of free range administration, user, and publish menus (which, like their chicken cousins, are more healthy, and happier). These menus can be placed in any site's page.tpl.php file, and you're user interfaces will sprout like chia-pets.

My RSS reader has somewhere's near 800 feeds at this point. In order to cope, I've for a long time had a folder titled, "Feeds I actually read" (yes, a number of my thunderbird folders are jokes that I crack to myself. Its pathetic...). Anyways, one of my favorites in the folder I actually read is a blog called Creating Passionante Users. One of the more recent entries had a graph that I thought every single drupal user, developer, and advocate should see:

So my persistant blogging on themes just payed off big time. Adrian, the author of PHPtemplate, and the initial instigator of 4.7's revolutionary forms API has been provoked into restarted his blog. So, in moving forward, my readers who are interested in drupal need to:

1. subscribe to his rss feed(xml) right now.  

2. Pay him a visit. 

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there is rather odd scene (actually, that movie is one long odd scene...) where the audience is introduced to "the genesis device". At one point during that scene Spock notes that "it's a timeless truth that it has always been easier to destroy than to create."

However, sharing that line from Star Trek is not entirely the reason why I am writing this post. nYou see Spock's somewhat haughty observation fired a synapse that gave birth to this post, and thus it became a "blog-worthy" introduction.