In reply to Anne McCarthy.

Thanks for the detailed response, Anne. Now, I have even more tickets to subscribe to. :)

In particular, I like seeing what the priority items are vs what will need more time to mature (to better set my own expectations). I agree that the navigation block has a ways to go to catch up to the many, many designs we've grown used to.

If I'm being honest, I've been reluctant to try and push the nav block from a dev/design perspective. I am pretty simple to please. I just want a basic slide-down mobile menu like I have on my personal blog:

That takes 11 lines of JS code and just a small amount of CSS. The HTML structure is also very different.

One of the things that is problematic -- and this is coming from other theme devs, too -- is that nav menus changed from just being data that we could manipulate to a very specific HTML structure with its own CSS and JS tied to it. And, this can also literally be stuck anywhere on the page (wondering if some template/block locking will help here...). That makes it extremely complex to get the design right in some cases.

Also, I'm just not a big fan of the default overlay mobile design. WordPress had to pick one of my least favorite implementations. :)

I'm going to try and take a crack at creating a custom nav menu design soon. It's something I need to explore more. I think it'll help me explain things better, too.