(another bizarre idea from Nick Minutello - needs more thinking I think)

In addition to macro registration (config params) that I mentioned previously, you should also be able to configure the macro to listen in on certain types of events (ie the macro chooses how to handle these events). The particular example would be the menu above - you wouldnt want it to generate the menu HTML it each time the page containing it is rendered, but rather cache and only clear the cache on create/edit snip events.