I wanted to post a comment to your question, but since I’m new on the site and don’t have enough rep I can’t do that.
This is indeed the way to go for what you need. There is quite a bit of code involved and you probably won’t get an out of the box copy/paste solution as an answer here, but as a starting point take a look at the answer to this question, experiment with a button for a start and then go from there: How to add a shortcode button to the TinyMCE editor?
It is not that hard to do, and the functionality provided will certainly make life easier for your users/editors. If you don’t have a lot of shortcodes you might want to settle for adding more buttons instead of a dropdown menu and just use the code in the linked question.