The problem isn't that you had to combine choices, I think it's the way in which they were combined. Perhaps Electronica might have gone better with Indie, for example. But there are too many combos required and not enough poll choices allowed, so there may not have been a better way to do this one as the combos will always make someone unhappy about selecting it even if the "OR" is totally understood.
It's really challenging to come up with a meaningful poll for in-game content that isn't kind of trivial (what kind of fertilizer is your sims' favorite? how often do your sims go grocery shopping?) and that can stand with only ten choices or nine plus a catch-all for "other." But we've only had the polling ability here in this forum section for a very short while now, I bet more of these will come along in time. :)