THnx for the warm words! About your question about leaving only 3 countries. My answer from 18th of December here was about it. This line:

$.each(['GB', 'CA', 'US'], function( iIndex, sValue ) {

is responsible to drop all other countries from the default list. You may change it also in this way:

$.each(['', 'GB', 'CA', 'US'], function( iIndex, sValue ) {

to have the "Please select" variant too.