I did call customer service yesterday in response to the suggestion from the TurboTax employee above, and reached someone who did seem to be making a good faith effort to help. She shared my screen and then researched the issue for quite a while, but in the end could find no information about the status of TurboTax's efforts to become an authorized transmitter of CA fiduciary returns. It seems that the helpline team simply doesn't have, or doesn't know how to find, access to information about the company's ongoing efforts to qualify to transmit returns in various States. Really, this is something that the company ought to be able to provide a helpful update on, as someone there is clearly working with the CA FTB to become authorized (that's what FTB told me per my post above).
In the end, the customer service phone rep suggested I simply mail the return this year, and at this point that's what I plan to do. I was thinking of waiting and trying again next month to see whether Turbotax has sorted this out with FTB, but I don't have high confidence that this will be done quickly since no one there seems to even know about it. Maybe next year.
