Hi @bturk. This is par for the course for TurboTax and Intuit.
My experience over the last 10 years is that they appear to prefer community debugging to investing in traditional options like tax form workflow regression testing. This means that the common forms and workflows all work fairly well, but things like filing childrens' taxes (particularly for 2+ children) often have problems because there are far fewer users exercising those forms. It's particularly bad whenever anything changes (like the TCJA changes that have impacted only users of the 8615 form over the last few years).
It's beyond me why they don't have a more comprehensive software verification infrastructure in place to deal with these things. Obviously it's not an easy thing to do given the amount of text prompt debugging involved (somehow their test suite needs to be able to interpret the interactive prompts in the same way as we do), but you'd think it would be something that they'd try and deal with. Or even have a suite of tests that they farm out to humans via taskrabbit.
As long as we keep buying the software there's little motivation for them to change though. Hopefully you're able to get the workaround working, if this is the same problem that you're experiencing. I honestly think that all of the information they're trying to collect isn't useful under the TCJA rules... the line 7 worksheet should be plenty.
