The hot pink stripe was dropped because the dye was not readily available, yes. The turquoise stripe was dropped because, when hung vertically from the green lamp posts on Market Street SF, the (then) middle green stripe became obscured, so they settled for 6 stripes. *Another story says that the organizers of the parade wanted to split the flag into two to decorate both sides of the street, which would have been impossible with an odd number of stripes and so they had to remove one of the colors.

But yeah lol, it had nothing to do with "respectability politics", which is just another silly term made up by attention whores to complain about people who just want to live their lives without making a spectacle of themselves.