There's quite a lot of options in programmer submenu, and depending on added files it can be long. However I don't need 52 different kinds of programmers. It would be nice if there's an easy way to clean those up and have it display just a few commonly used programmers such as Arduino as ISP, USBTinyISP, and such. Something within Preference, a tab for programmers. You select the ones you want, the rest will not be displayed.
Incidentally I am also seeing (and guilty myself) mixup between ArduinoISP and Arduino as ISP. The latter is what we use if we are using Arduino to program another Arduino or stand alone AVR chips. ArduinoISP is different that it's a small board that plugs into ICSP pins but the name are very close and often leads to mistake and resulting in error code.
You can always edit programmers.txt and comment out the ones you don't like but this is not very user friendly and it must be done over every time you update the package. I remember there being some similar discussion regarding the Tools > Board menu, which can get very crowded with boards we never use.
I think the Arduino as ISP / ArduinoISP confusion is exacerbated by the sketch that you use to turn your Arduino into an "Arduino as ISP" being named "ArduinoISP". After uploading that sketch it only makes sense to select Tools > Programmer > ArduinoISP. I don't think there's anything that can be done in the IDE to fix that. Maybe the relevant documentation could be looked over to make sure this is explained as clearly and prominently as possible.