Thank you for raising this issue.
Edbrowse has native support for ftp, but ftp has no headers and no help, so edbrowse is a bit limited in its understanding, as is every other ftp client.
I know what you mean about a gopher menu, ftp presents each directory as a menu, showing subdirectories and files.
Clients understand this, as does edbrowse.
I turn a menu listing into html, with links, ftp links, that take you to subdirectories and/or files.
It works pretty well.
I imagine something like that could be done for gopher, and I'd say it has to be native, like ftp, I don't think this is a plugin situation.
I'll play around with the public gopher sites as time permits,
this is something edbrowse should do.

Karl Dahlke