The main strength of menus is cramming lots of options in a small space.
What you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.
I particularly hate cascading menus because of the tendency of the
subordinate menu to dissappear if you do not move the mouse precisely
enough, especially on high res screens with small text. Also any
hierarchical setup makes finding the subordinate items very hard, as it
is very difficult to traverse a complex tree and remember where you have
already been. Thats another pet hate of mine - the awful Unix directory
structure, with its /lib/bin/share/bin/lib" structure. e.g. Is it
in /lib/bin/hotplug or /lib/hotplug/bin or /lib/sbin/local/share/hotplug
or lib/hotplug/local/bin/share etc... I think you get the point.
Probably i am too impatient and menus are best when used sedately.