Taking Amazon SES to production can be a little tricky, I think I am talking to robots with templated messages. Maybe I don't have luck or didn't explain myself well enough.
I didn't have any trouble with getting them to enable production mode SES for my personal email domains. The only thing I can think of that might have helped me (besides making it clear I wasn't using this for marketing emails) was that my AWS account had been open and in good standing for quite a while before enabling SES.