Spotify For Authors Won't Budge

There's a small possibility that I'm doing something wrong when trying to upload my novel to Spotify for Authors, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out what that would be. 

I don't consider my novel glaringly large. It's only 259 pages, which I view as average. But even after stripping all the hidden metadata (which I had no clue about) out of my EPUB, Spotify still tells me I've exceeded the maximum character count.

What concerns me is that I've read no other author complaints about the uploading process. I've come across some feedback regarding the quality of the audiobook itself, but nobody else had an issue uploading? 

I will give kudos to the company's author support team, which has been conscientious in responding to my queries quickly, but the issue is out of its hands and in the hands of the IT staff, who...well, if you've had any experience with IT people, you know how they are. They do things the way they do them, and they're not going to change because you, a peon, asked them to.

Author Support dutifully checked in with IT and the response was:

"We've found out that the error message that you're seeing is due to the EPUB that you uploaded is exceeding the maximum character (letters) limit that we allow, which is 500,000." 

(Yes, I knew that.)

"They advised that to proceed with the creation process, you'll be needing to upload a new EPUB with fewer characters and it should now proceed." 

So, according to Spotify's IT Department, I'm supposed to delete words from my novel in order to comply. I like my words--all of them. I'm keeping them.

Days before contacting the company, I'd followed AI instructions explicitly and stripped all my hidden metadata. Now, when I go back to AI to let it know it didn't work, I'm met with a whole new list of instructions for "polishing" my EPUB. No offense, AI, but how about giving me the complete guide the first time? 

I refuse to believe that other authors go through this much work to upload their novels. Only a fool (me) would bother.

Logically, and I realize no company is going to do this, but why doesn't Spotify have some kind of conversion process that eliminates this issue? Unless it's actually my issue alone.

The ironic part of all this is that I probably wouldn't like the final product, even if I was able to get that far. But I wanted to at least try it out, partially to report back and partially because there's a chance it "could work". 

I may try polishing my EPUB or AI's previous suggestion of splitting my file into two. Pretty sure neither of those things will work out in the end.

My third option is simply to give up. That one's sure to work.