Hi Jay,
By the way, If you have a default status in the Safecracker control panel. This status will still dominate in a new entry even though you declared “Draft” explicitly as your status when you submitted the SAEF.
Yes this is what Lisa pointed out above. The defaults set in the CP mean anything in the form, as sent by the user, will be ignored.
You may set the following settings per channel.
Default Status - Set a default status for this channel. Any user-submitted status will be ignored.
Let us know what else comes up with your testing