Hi Dan,
I think you can implement this as an alternative for what you are trying to archive. You can go to the layout that you are using for your pages:
After you find out what layout you will be using, create a copy into your module (to modify it and not lose changes with updates):
In here, you could create a Menu document instead of Project Navigation:
You will have the same options, but you could see if this works in a way where you could have different menus shown to different users.
Here I have two menu documents, where I can surround each one of them in a container, after that I set the container visiblity to “selected roles”:
The final result is that each role that you want to customize, will view a different menu bar (with the different items that you want).
I hope that helps you with your question, best regards!