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The cluster not meeting the "offsets.topic.replication.factor" requirement on the internal topic is another way of saying the cluster isn't fully setup yet. The right behavior should be for "offsets.topic.replication.factor" to be enforced.

Rationale for the prior behavior can be found in 

Public Interfaces

Set the offsets.topic.replication.factor to 1 in config/server.properties to maintain existing single-broker quickstart behavior.

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