What I'm seeing with multi-variants doesn't look very efficient when compared to other systems. Here is an example.

iPhone 5 and iPhone 5C

iPhone 5C comes with 3 carriers (AT&T, Verizon, and Unlocked)
iPhone 5C comes in 5 colors
Both come in 3 conditions (New, Refurbished, Carrier Returned)

iPhone 5C now has a total of 45 different products

iPhone 5 has 3 carriers and 3 conditions for a total of 9 different products.

Altogether we have 54 different products.

When I view every other site, there's only 2 products in this case and you use drop downs to select the attributes. Why is this not the case in OpenERP? I only have a total of around 150 different products but my product list is over 2,000 after using variants. I can understand if OpenERP would like to track each different attribute as a different product, but at least there needs to be a way to have parent child relationships, so I can filter by top-level products and see just 150 and drill down from there. When you start talking about manufacturing, this gets out of control having each different manufacturing option a different product.

Is there a good reason for this method or am I missing a setting where I can attach sub products (children) to parent products?