Multiple menus pointing to the same page

In article http://drupal.org/node/146504, the writer says

No two menu headings can point to the same page (same path). Every menu item seems to need to point to its own page.

and this seems to be the case. A top level menu like this will be visible, but submenus which point to nodes referenced elsewhere are suppressed. I found several posts over the past several years which reported this curious behavior. Is there some really important technical issue here? As anyone developed a patch which removes this restriction? I have many cases where I'd like menus to reference nodes referenced by another menu. Making a separate web page with a s/a link is a poor substitute. TIA