Yeah, I understand that. But, we were not making progress so I thought it worth getting more background info. I scoured the webs and did not find many similar cases.
There was a post in 2018 on this forum with same "refused" error message with Terraform and Route53 but no resolution.
The only other one I saw was for a different product (Concourse, not Terraform) but same "refused" message looking up TXT record for _acme-challenge record. This one used google name servers. This resolved after fixing poorly configured DNS apparently.
When stuck, get more info 