If I understand correctly, you would have to save inbetween each change of the initial attribute for those other subpages to appear/disappear though.
Neither situation is perfect as the first solution to the problem (via parameterized lookups) involves the attribute fields always being present, and upon change of the initial attribute value it will reset the picklist values for the subsequent attributes too.
I suspect that there are no other choices for now than between those two, and to log an idea for what you really wanted to do without the compromises.