I have been evaluating these two menus modules today and I am going with the Superfish Module. Both are pretty painless to setup but it appears that Superfish has more options available. The SS shows what I have in place so far. And I am pretty happy with it. And this type of content lends itself very well to styling through CSS. There are all sorts of things that you can achieve that way.
You can use theme-able functions to achieve this but I really do recommend you stay away from writing code if you can. Not because code isn’t the funnest puzzle game out there; it is. But because as soon as you start writing your own code for your own site by yourself… it is on you to maintain it. Why do that when Drupal offers so many ways to skin a cat? Don’t get me wrong. Do code, do contribute do help chase down bugs. But limit your exposure by taking advantage of the enormous amount of code already out there. Want to work with the code? Chase down some bugs and help the community.