The solution is simple, MobileFrontend should merge a default mobile menu with any MediaWiki:Sidebar found on the site, eliminating any duplicate entries to dynamically produce the final mobile menu shown to users.
Taking my http://abj.jidanni.org/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&action=raw as an example, * navigation ** mainpage|mainpage-description ** Special:NewPages|newpages ** Special:Categories|categories ** recentchanges-url|recentchanges ** randompage-url|randompage * SEARCH * TOOLBOX * LANGUAGES
surely some hints could be taken from there for dynamically constructing a mobile menu without having staff call up Jenkins out of retirement to ask him to make something for mobile.
Anyway there should also be some Hook so admins can further tweak what gets cooked up. And one day even users should be able to do things with it if not already, like Facebook's menus, which by the way are almost the same, mobile vs. desktop, and mainly user controlled.