Making certain suboptions excluded means that they will not be shown in the Option for this specific instance of the Option. For instance, you have "Buggi or Vuggi?" custom option in two products. It means that you re use the same option for two products and you have two instances of this option. Then you want to exclude (temporarily or permanently) one or more suboptions for the first product. So you do not have to remove these suboptions! Just mark them "excluded" and save (no need to save to DB in this case) the option settings and that's it - excluded suboptions will not be shown for the current option's instance in the current product.