okay so I think I have a solution here but I would like other houdini users to help me confirm this is an issue overall.
It seems that if you use a fetch node in a ropnet and pipe that into the deadline submitter it wont work if there is a switch Sop in the Sop tree connected to the Rop Geometry Output targeted by the fetch node.
If you remove the switches from your Sop tree it will not have a throw the above error.
The solution to this problem was to remove the fetch node and use the Geometry node in the rop contexts as well. Then it has no problem submitting with the deadline submitter.
Could anyone confirm that they have the same issue?
You can download an example file that I have created that produces the error.