Wait a minute, the recreate steps say "not configuring cell service and not creating default cell." - is this in a recreate with the nova-cells service enabled? That is cells v1, which is optional. So are you running with the nova-cells service but have CONF.cells.enabled=False in nova.conf in the API node? Or are you not running with cells v1 at all (note that cells v2 is not optional and is not related to the [cells] options in nova.conf and doesn't run via the nova-cells service).
Wait a minute, the recreate steps say "not configuring cell service and not creating default cell." - is this in a recreate with the nova-cells service enabled? That is cells v1, which is optional. So are you running with the nova-cells service but have CONF.cells. enabled= False in nova.conf in the API node? Or are you not running with cells v1 at all (note that cells v2 is not optional and is not related to the [cells] options in nova.conf and doesn't run via the nova-cells service).