Activate Slide on Click

The main reason is that I believe it should just be an option. I have a couple of designers that are working on some projects for us that don't want the clicks to break the horizontal styling. They would prefer the links to hit the slides so that that the visitors don't leave the slideshow.

I see what you are saying but the menu structure is part of the design. The site currently uses six slideshows to display different sections of the site. The slideshows range from just two slides to a dozen slides. The navigation is a series of drop down menus. The designers want to be able to have the links in the drop downs to reference individual slides in multiple different slideshows on a click - providing the illusion that they are zipping to another slide in the slideshow - which, of course, could be a different section, thus, a different slideshow.

Essentially, they would like to maintain the left and right click for each slide control through out the site rather than going to the individual pages. Does that help? Granted it is more of a visual requirement than proper navigation of a site but I am not the designer in this case but I also think it is an interesting idea.

For example, if someone has a slide show of photographs that display in a slide show, it would be interesting to be able to create a link within a paragraph of text and send them to the image being referenced within the context of the slideshow.

Perhaps this is another functionality altogether that maybe belongs within the core Views Slideshow module? Yet, I do think this functionality may be worth inclusion in this module as it does deal specifically with menu items and may be expanded to links on the fly. A class trigger or rel= trigger may be interesting.