Attach a node to a menu link OR attach custom fields to menu links? My client would like to add content to the top-level links in the main menu, in order to have "Featured" content that is displayed in the drop-down menu. They must be able to choose which piece of content will be shown, and which menu link it will be associated with. I figure I have two options:

1) Creating a "Featured in Menu" Content Type and adding a drop-down menu of top-level menu links as a field. The problem with this is I am not sure how to output a custom field that will list top-level main menu links. There does not seem to be a module currently that will achieve this, so I guess I would have to do it from scratch.

2) Adding custom fields to the main menu links themselves (image, title, node reference). I tried using the Power Menu module to achieve this, however every version of the module I tried gave SQL errors and broke the Edit Menu page. I'm hesitant to debug and pursue a fix for that module if it could end up being unstable.

I'm not sure which solution would be preferable but either way I'm stuck! I would very much appreciate some help on how to achieve either one of these solutions. (Or if I'm totally over-thinking this and there's a much easier way to achieve this, by all means please let me know.) For the record, I'm using Drupal 7. 

Thanks!
Look into like Menu Views or GigaMenu or MegaMenu ... there are a few solutions that let you place a view in a menu.

Then you can either add a field to a content type such as, "include in featured menu" of type boolean, that you use as a Filter in your View. Or, re-use the "promote to frontpage" re-labeled to fit your needs on a specific content type.