I'll second Vik's vote for the new navigation being tremendously better than the old way!
However, (you knew it was coming) would it be possible to add a configuration option to have the navigation menus only pop-up when the left mouse button/touch-screen button is held down for some amount of time? If you just click on a button/press Enter it should immediately go into the selected level/play the file if you've already drilled all the way down to a song. Then you could assign another key (no idea which one) to pop up the menu. This would allow remote users to navigate quickly, or pop up the menu (using a second) button, if they needed to access the other features.
If you make it a configurable option and default it to the current method, new users will know about the menu and when they start to get tired of hitting enter/clicking twice they'll hopefully go looking for an option like the one I've described above.
-John