Thanks for sharing your experience.
In general if plugins use the same capabilities you may block unneeded plugin menus via “Admin menu access” add-on you referenced at your post.
Some plugins changes capabilities, which they use for menu protection, dynamically:
use one for ‘administrator’ role and another one for other roles. Such cases require investigation as the admin menu access module shows menu items list using capabilities it got from menu for the ‘administrator’ role.
