Despite not being able to start the KotFE quest line, I was able to 'recover" C2-N2. apparently my Jedi Knight must've meditated for 5yrs and I didn't notice. This half open, half locked stuff is really annoying.
Starting to consider removing the Game time and Cartel Coin cards from my Amazon wishlist, way too much time spent trying to work around broken quests, and super slow customer service(and 90% of the time form letter brush off) response to tickets. CSR logged in and responding to fleet chat would probably eliminate the ticket gridlock; worked for Everquest.
Found several people who had same problem with this first quest, who were using referral codes to sub. Apparently KotFE unlocked successfully for about half of them(one even reported receiving the free gifts for sub by date), while the others got stuck the glitch and a form letter bot ticket response.