I very much agree that the ISO-fu'ivla are silly. In addition, I
consider them rather useless. When the discussion that spawned their
creation came up, I felt it a better idea to go the opposite route:
instead of making "cultural fu'ivla" for all the existing X, a list that
will continuously change and pretty much always result in words that can
only be understood by people who know the ISO in the first place, make
lujvo stripped of their specificity. All of the cultural gismu have one
or more of six categories in their definitions, hence the creation of
the six lujvo {tutra'a} (geography), {selgu'era'a} (nationality),
{klura'a} (culture), {jdara'a} (religion), {cemra'a} (community), and
{banra'a} (language).
Without going into opinions as to how common talking about such is or
will be in Lojban, it is handy to be able to talk about {lo klura'a be
lo nunjmaji} or {lo jdara'a be la.vylkan.} without having to look at
some arbitrarily long list.