One of the causes of this is that it can be very difficult to know what is correct or not, even if you're trying to do it right and have the best intentions.
Constantly changing county boundaries can be hard to follow and we don't always know what we don't know. Records are often described as being of a certain place, because they are currently held in that place. I've had this experience in both the U.S. and Scotland.
Early U.S. records may end up as part of a county's records, but the county didn't exist at the time. Something will pop up in my research some way down the line and it's hard to remember all the places I need to go back and update to the correct place.
Scotland's parish records tend to be named with the post-1890 counties. But before that the counties weren't contiguous, so you have to look at old maps to know exactly where the person lived, where the parish was, etc. Functionally, the parish was part of that county's parishes, but it might have physically been in an exclave of a different county. So the citation might say one place, but it was really another. I'm pretty sure that virtually all the places that were in exclaves before the counties were made contiguous are wrong in the drop down. But if you have a parish record that says its from Ross-shire and a drop down that says that's where the place is, it takes some pretty advanced knowledge to know that it's not.
Anyway, I agree that the goal should be to make all the places correct and we should correct them as we find them, but I don't think it's just people being sloppy or lazy in their work.
It might help to start a mini-campaign to make it clear to users that the drop down menu is there to help, but they aren't obligated to choose something because it isn't always correct for the dates, places are know to be missing, etc.
