All very good info that as far as I know is all pretty unique to SES regarding the default/sandbox vs the upgraded production capabilities. The set up makes a lot of sense to prevent abuse and it works just fine out of the box for dev purposes. The production version also operates way more how you'd actually expect an email service to work.

All that said, I don't know of any other services that have this "production" upgrade that is needed other than maybe just the general service limits (which have always seemed more of a "protect you from yourself" situation) so it can be a touch confusing.