Should NavigationView extend ItemsControl?

[koal44]

I was looking a PR #759 that I had canceled because of formatting issues and considering to re-implement it. However, thinking anew, NavigationView holds two collectons: MenuItems and MenuFooterItems both of these with with item type NavigationViewItem. It's a bit cumbersome to manage one collection, as ItemsControl does, let alone two. Also ItemsControl comes with some other goodies like templating. If the purpose of these collections is to visually separate them, you can still accomplish this with a single collection, say with property NavgationItems by adding to NavigationViewItem property MenuType (enum with Values None/Footer). Then in applytemplate you can try to filter the Items into two different views. maybe like this:

public override void OnApplyTemplate()
{
    base.OnApplyTemplate();

    MenuItemsItemsControl.SetCurrentValue(ItemsControl.ItemsSourceProperty, Items);
    ICollectionView menuView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(MenuItemsItemsControl.ItemsSource);
    menuView.Filter = item =>
    {
        return item is NavigationViewItem navItem && navItem.MenuType == MenuType.Menu;
    };

    FooterMenuItemsItemsControl.SetCurrentValue(ItemsControl.ItemsSourceProperty, Items);
    ICollectionView footerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(FooterMenuItemsItemsControl.ItemsSource);
    footerView.Filter = item =>
    {
        return item is NavigationViewItem navItem && navItem.MenuType == MenuType.FooterMenu;
    };
 }

Even if this code doesn't work there's lots of workarounds. The app dev would then write their xaml like so:

<ui:NavigationView>
    <ui:NavigationView.Items>
        <ui:NavigationViewItem
            Content="Dashboard" />
        <ui:NavigationViewItem
            Content="Home" />
        <ui:NavigationViewItem
            Content="Settings"
            MenuType="NavigationMenuType.Footer" />
    </ui:NavigationView.Items>
</ui:NavigationView>

So essentially it'd break everyone's code, but on the plus side you get to leverage the framework's templating, for greater user ui customization.
Worth coding or nah?

[koal44]

I'll answer my own question. Since this project aims to model WinUI's Fluent theme, the answer is "no". wuxc:NavigationView