Unless a bug was introduced recently, it's doubtful that TurboTax is misbehaving. Many times when someone thinks that they qualify for the credit they actually don't, often because they have no income tax against which to apply the credit for which they would otherwise qualify. The credit is a nonrefundable credit which can only be applied to reduce income tax, but not below zero, not to any other taxes such as self-employment tax or penalties on early retirement distributions.
If the TurboTax rep could not identify a specific problem in a short amount of time by simply examining Form 8880, they probably didn't have the familiarity with this credit needed to understand the problem.
