Yep. There is no way to use any model of creating a specific family instance... officially. There is a plugin that let's you create an object based on a string naming paramater.
I assure you I tried the same thing and thought the same thing. If you are doing Create Family, then the object will be random from the Family. If you Create Object which is in a family, then you will create the object..
Do you need to create the object. If your using store items. Should you just use one object, but have numerous frames/animations to distinguish the items. Then just use setAnimation/Frame.