I think that the drop-downs are trying to prevent people from mistyping things and locking themselves out because "Accordien" doesn't match "accordion".

How about 5 random questions, 5 random answers and record all of these in your password manager?

If you have a password manager that successfully tracks the questions, then there's no reason to need to recover the password, as you'll just track the password in the same system.

The catch-22 of these systems is that recovery questions need to be obvious, memorable and unchanging enough to the user that they are useful for recovery, while also being hard for a third party to guess/research. I feel like for the most part those are more often than not mutually exclusive.