Thank you for the suggestions @beachcamp !
Was trying to avoid the clutter of copies, but the scripting it is a good idea. And I have been using the autocomplete for it anyways but still want to make it as simple as I can for users. There's like 5-10 options they use daily and then 100 more that might get used once a month.
What I've ended up deciding to do is, I had an "Other" option in my pick list that opened up a text question for free entry, I've set up a choice filter that will show the most relevant + Other for the first question, then changed the free text to a select one that just shows ALL of them for the secondary question if they pick other.