Attributes dropdowns all showing in cart

Usually folks just have one set of image attribute dropdowns but the site I'm working on has up to three sets. So in the shopping cart each shows up. I've set the first to be Please choose so that the order will at least show, among all the choices, the correct choice will be there.

But it's confusing to both the site owner (who really hates it) and the user.

I don't mind coding a statement in somewhere to only have the correct choice showing but if there's another way of doing this so that it works, we can look at another option.

There really are too many choices to effectively do radio buttons or checkbox.

Any other ideas or some directions for me to look at coding for the cart?

I think I see where attributes come in the shopping cart class

I solved the problem by changing to a radio field instead with no default choice. Only the chosen one shows up in the cart.

Then installed Stock by attributes and it requires all three show up in the cart in order to check stock.

So back to the original problem.