That would be a core change and is something I've got no control over. I can see where it might be advantageous to do it that way in some situations but I really have to agree with how the core team implemented the authentication wrapper. In my experience the majority of web users are very visual and having the buttons there in plain site for them to chose from is more intuitive than it is to pick from a drop-down list. What I would suggest you do is to request the change as an enhancement in the public section on Gemini (http://support.dotnetnuke.com)