What I found was that the A2003 menu (and the A97 menu) was/is a dream to use. It uses a very simple process to successively show user designed pages of menus.
You design numbered pages, so page 1 may have say 10 options*
The default was 7, I think, but I ended up having 25 options, 3 columns of 8 items, with a final option 25 to return to the previous menu page. (I might have done 31 items, rather than 25). 7 options is just too few. It's a bit fiddly to set up, but you only have to set up the form once.
I'm sure
@Pat Hartman says she does something very similar.
The entries you design for page 1 may open forms, open reports, run queries, or jump to a different menu page. In fact it's easy enough to add code to do any other action you desire. I only ever opened forms from my menus. Very occasionally I did something else. I had an all purpose report manager form to deal with reports. The only catch is that every page needs to have an option 1. I couldn't work out how to get it to comply if there wasn't an option 1, so it was easiest to always have one.
I never understood the changes that came in from A2007 onwards (maybe it didn't change till after A2007). So all I ever did was pull in my A2003 switchboard form, and switchboard items table into later databases, and manually edit the table.
Maybe hierarchical menus are a bit old fashioned, but I just think they work well for many business applications.
I also added an A2003 menu bar which duplicated many of the switchboard options. I tried, but struggled to achieve this with the ribbon. I didn't remove much of the existing menu bar options. I think it's useful for users to have those features at times.