In most instances, you're absolutely correct. However, for this store type, shoppers generally select the type (category) of furniture first, like sofa, loveseat or chair, then the fabric for their selected item.

Showing 100's of fabric swatches can indeed be very confusing, which is why, on our current non-Zen Cart store (www.livinggreenfurniture.com) we categorized the fabrics by type, like Solids, Stripes, Floral, Patterns, etc. I hope we can eventually do this in our Zen Cart store, too, but I first need to find a way to just display one option set at a time. Once that's figured out, I'll see if we can break the options down a bit further.

Thanks for your thoughts - much appreciated!