What do you do about Associated Reference Location in your automated Location feed?

Summary

I really dislike Associated Reference Location

Content

Hey folks,

I need some advice.  We're implementing work location in our location structure and I'm attempting to set up an interface that will maintain it for us on an ongoing basis.    

I had planned to assign the ARL on all of our locations to their associated country.  This give us a limited number of codes to work with (70ish) and ensures 100% match and successful creation of locations.  Unfortunately, I’ve just found that when a candidate comes to our site to search for a job, the drop-down list of countries available to them is not based on our defined Tier 1 values but instead is based on any location at any level in our structure that has a Country assigned as the ARL – which for me right now means ALL