You could use only {NAVIGATION} shortcode before. The problem was that it has to be hardcoded in template files and some LAN has to be used for the caption. 

This limitation complicated things mainly for the footer with columns...  it means limited variability for the content of those columns, together with tablestyle() limitation for captions.

Some workaround was the shortcode menu... you could insert the navigation shortcode there and add a caption in the Menu manager. But it needed an external plugin to install.

Now the core solved this problem by adding the navigation plugin and navigation menu.

You can add the menu via Menu Manager (2.3.1 for sure). Then add your caption, select links group, and links template. You can have any number of templates, not just limited to core ones. Any combination of groups and templates is possible.

This is pretty cool, because:

- you don't need to worry about translation (it is inbuilt with menus in the core)

- you don't need to worry about the footer column - if they want there something else than links, they just replace the menu with something else

- you can test a theme easily, you can use one group of links for all template keys

The default template key is "side". 

You can still use navigation shortcode, mainly for the main navigation. But do you know that you can send a class for the main navbar as a parameter?  Nice improvement too.