We Rewrote the Menu System Three Times
Each rewrite taught us something we should have known from the start — and each was worth it.
The first menu system was hand-built with a switch statement. It worked. It also broke every time we added a new screen.
The second was data-driven, JSON-loaded, and "future-proof." It collapsed under controller navigation. We discovered that focus management is a real engineering problem the moment you leave mouse-and-keyboard land.
The third — the one we're shipping — is a small state machine with explicit focus rings and audible cues. It's the simplest of the three. We could have written it in week one if we'd known what we needed.