Active <LI> tags in menus, a real solution please.

I build designs and themes for Drupal sites, and I really love doing this but there is one problem I have to deal with on every theme I make which completely sucks and I have yet to ever get any solution to it. This problem is the creation of an active menu for the page or node currently being viewed by the user. This is extremely frustrating for me as I have to use other inferior CMS sometimes for other projects but those CMS (wordpress ,Joomla, etc) may suck but my themes/templates always look complete with them as I have the ability to customize the menus to my liking. This might not seem like a big deal to devs but when my client requests that the primary tabs actually reflect the selected page, which the client almost always does request I get to tell them "No, Drupal's theme engines don't address that yet" which makes Drupal sound like crap to the client, which we of course know is not true.

Not having properly active menus is a terribly blow to designers and to be honest I really feel like the community doesn't address enough design related issues to help us non "smartay guys" to design and properly theme Drupal and it is no secret that people tend to think Drupal themes are "less attractive" then say Joomla sites and I think this stems from issues like the non active menus. Don't get me wrong I would never mean to start a debate about which CMS I prefer, even with the design issues inherent in Drupal i still prefer it a thousand to one to my alternatives.

I am currently using a modified version of includes/common.inc which does allow me to at least get an active A tag but this isn't the proper solution from a design perspective, what we ideally need is an active LI tag like so

- BAD! -

<li><a class="selected">Menu Item</a></li>

- GOOD! -

<li class="selected"><a>Menu Item</a></li>

Putting the class in the LI allows us to easily style both the A and its parent and is required for many of the menu design trends requested these days.

There are posts all over Drupal.org that suggest they have solutions but each post is riddled with posts by people that cant get the solutions to work and I have yet to see one that does, at best I can get the active A and not the LI.

People point to the "Menu Trails" module which I have yet to see do anything other then simply make themes not render content and spit errors.

I am a designer, there is a very very high possibility (more then not) that I simply to not understand all the necessary steps to properly modify my core files, or all the tricks not mentioned in the poorly written "Menu Trails" "documentation" to get it to behave in the way it was designed. I don't understand how after all this time this is still something that isn't either core or a module for download, I started a GPL theme almost a year ago for release here and after waiting for this entire time there is still no solution and I still cannot release the theme/themes I want to.

Does anyone out there have a real solution that will actually accomplish valid "menu trails"? It would be amazing to see a real and relaible to implement solution that didn't required modifying Drupal core to accomplish it but at this point I will do anything, just tell me how.

Us designers need to start providing more to the community but when its so damn hard to just get a menu to look the way its designed it becomes more frustrating and time consuming than I am willing to invest, please help.