It appears that there is currently a race condition where we can commit a write to the catalog which adds a reference to a newly created table, but then be unable to publish the table because we have set the stepdown epoch. WiredTiger cannot publish a table which was created prior to setting the stepdown epoch even if the publish epoch is greater than the stepdown epoch because it needs to know at table creation time if it is creating in leader or follower mode, not at publish time.

This probably requires an additional lock so that we can check prior to committing if the stepdown timestamp has been set, and if so roll back the transaction. We then need to hold the lock until the publish has completed.