First off: I officially threw that whole "low effort game" thing out of the window with this. This is a lot of effort, and it's not even undergone by me.
Long story short: I was talking to Cherry about Zack & Brian, and I mentioned I wanted to drop the custom menu because all the game pause specific things were too much of a hassle for a menu that was basically a fancy-pants version of the standard menu. He said he liked the way the old menu looks. This lead to the following "compromise":
Zack & Brian is getting a customized standard menu!
There are still a few things to polish, windows to move and RM internal bugs to fix, but as a whole, it works, and it looks just fabulous.
The new old main menu. The map is completely frozen in the background.
...the silly description is subject to change.
PS: That doesn't mean that Cherry's open for requests. I'm still squeeing internally over the fact that he does this for me.