Wheat yeast uses "hybrid" beer pitching rate calculation

I figured out why my Weiss recipe was calculating a rather high number of yeast cells required - the calculator uses either ale, lager, or hybrid for the calculation. If a wheat beer yeast is selected, the calculator uses the hybrid calculation. Why?

A wheat beer is still an ale surely? I can change the values for the actual yeast from wheat to ale, but that seems a bit of a hack to me - it is still a wheat beer yeast, but is used for brewing an ale. I would have thought that the type of yeast and the type of fermentation (ale, lager, hybrid) are two distinct variables.

The type of yeast is configured under the properties for that particular yeast.  If you open up the properties of the wheat yeast you are using, you will see the type listed as 'wheat' which then sets the pitching rate according to the recommendations of the yeast supplier.  If you want to change how the starter calculator calculates the number of yeast cells which are required, you can select the yeast properties and change the type to 'ale' to get the starter calculator to use a lower cell count per degree plato per mil .