Want Control of my Marinelli Menus

I am running Marinelli on Drupal 7 (7.x-3.0-beta11). Been using it about a year. My prior experience with sites was about 6 years of html-js-css-using-notepad, so CMS is "new" to me.

The menus were never Marinelli's strong suit. The example site (netsons; which seems to no longer be there) had a nice multi-level menu arrangement but it never worked that way on my site. I assumed it was just me and I was configuring it wrong and I would figure it out with time, but it was good enough so it wasn't a high priority.

However, as time has passed and my site has gotten more complicated, it has just gotten worse and worse. I am up to about 120 nodes for registered users and it is getting to the point where ->I<- cant find my menu entries, nevermind a new user.

I have searched the site(s) and apparently many people have had Marinelli menu issues in the past but none of their fixes seem to work for me. Among others: 1060114, 1369740, 1142292

The symptoms:
When I hover over the horizontal tabs, the width of the columns is more-or-less INVERSELY proportional to the amount of space it should have, the submenus are all jumbled together with no clear hierarchy and have no indentation (although there is a small font differentiation) and the height of the dropdown is waaay too tall. Reminds me of the joke about the pilot who thought the runway was SUPER-ULTRA wide but HORRIBLY-TERRIBLY short (ie he landed on it sideways):

The First tab has 6 entries and 2 of those have about 3 subs each. It is very very narrow, only 1 word wide and scrolls way off the bottom of the screen.

The second tab has four items and 1 of them has 4 subitems and it looks more or less perfect for both width and length.

The third tab has five items with no subs and it is about 3 times as wide as it needs to be.

Fourth tab, lots of items, complete rubbish- similar to the first.

Fifth tab, only 3 items and its really wide.

Sixth tab on out, all 1 layer and way wider than they need to be, whitespace is wider than the text.

What I would like to have is:
- Main menus with tabs across the top for the first level (good so far). Evenly spaced would rock, but that's not a deal breaker.
- When I click or hover over those a drop-down menu appears below that showing the next level. Width wide enough that only a silly-long node name would have to wrap to the next line, but not so wide that the whitespace is wider than the text. "Mailing address" and "Contact us" would easily fit on a single line without wrapping, for example.
- ...and then either the next level is in smaller, offset type or even a new popup for the levels below that

I don't see why it is doing this in the first place, especially when the sample did not. Am I configuring something wrong? Or do I need to just override Marinelli's menus altogether? Something in-between? Can I just add a "mega-menu" type module or will it conflict?

I appreciate your assistance.