Hi Jousef,
I was sure you were going to suggest that, as we had this discussion with no resolution recently… The final issue was that there was no way of knowing that level 0 cells were too big, nor how much smaller to make them to make it work or how much bigger to make the domain at the same level 0 cells size…
There is another trick to make the mesh always appear with my existing Level 0 refinement size and number of cells…
I can make this surface mesh always ‘appear’ if I simply add a feature refinement to the max level of surface refinement, I just don’t like having to do that 
I am hoping someone else will come up with a more tasteful solution other than changing Level 0 cell size to some ‘unknown’ level before we see the surface mesh appear…
Dale