How to limit categories in home page setup

Hi Guys,
A plea for help/advice in two parts please:
1. In Real Estate Responsive 8.0 I am setting up Theme Options > Page Setup > Home Page.
In Display Setup, I have chosen to show Text/HTML, Categories and Recent Listings (all inline).
I have five top-level categories, one of which is Country. This category has (at present) 86 sub-categories, each of which is a country name. Where appropriate, each of these (larger) countries is then broken down into another level of sub-categories, by region. So, for example, a user could select the Country top-category, then USA as the second level and then California as the third level to view properties in California only
Could anyone please tell me how I may limit the category levels shown on the Home page to (in this case) Country > Country Name only – i.e. I do not wish to show on the Home page, all of the individual US States etc. I have (at present) over 500 subcategories under the top level category ‘Country’ alone and, since these are listed vertically down the page, the result looks terrible.
Selecting each category and subcategory in the ‘Parent Category Display’ area is not really practical.
2. Also, is there a way to get the categories and subcategories to run horizontally across the page rather than vertically down it in order to vastly reduce the length of a page caused by all the (in my case) countries running down it?
Thank you all for your thoughts and time.