In-place repair upgrade has been shown to fix it. MS haven't (yet) acknowledged this bug, but if/when they do I'd expect they can fix it in a CU. In my testing I did look at the registry, but couldn't find a way to fix it - best leave the registry alone in case you prevent any fix MS may send from working.
You can afford to wait, after all you're not going to need to defer features updates any time in the next six months
It's also in a tutorial...
Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade
I think I found the reg keys
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UpdatePolicy\PolicyState
seems up to 4 might do it to set it back to 0 feature days, not sure I want to mess with it, I can export as a backup.
What's interesting is there a value "ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate"=0 and I do have it disabled in windows and GPE, so that is odd, would think it would be 1 value for enabled.
Yes, those are the keys.
To confirm this bug I deliberately broke a test machine running in a VM by deferring features updates for 7 days then upgrading to 1903. I then tried to fix it in the registry to get 'defer features updates' to reappear in Advanced settings. Nothing I tried got the options to reappear on the Settings page, certainly not setting DeferFeaturesUpdatePeriodInDays back to zero.
Fortunately none of my physical machines have this bug as defer features/quality update were both at zero days before the upgrade. If I were in your situation I'd either try the repair install, or just wait for a CU to fix it. I'd leave the registry alone for fear of making things worse. It's not the obvious suspects that have made the defer settings go AWOL.
Selecting the Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted) (default) or Semi-Annual Channel branch readiness level has been eliminated in 1903 and beyond:
The image below shows the Settings panel as it looks today with Windows 10, version 1809.
When version 1903 is released, it will look like this:
As you can see, it shows only pause and deferral settings; Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted) is no longer presented as an option. Again, this change will only be seen once you have deployed Windows 10, version 1903 and will only impact future feature updates after version 1903.
Windows Update for Business and the retirement of SAC-T
Ok, I will leave it, you know sometimes changing a value will change another value somewhere else in the reg.
Just curious if you remember did you also set these 2 to 0 values? (that's all in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UpdatePolicy\PolicyState key).
DeferFeatureUpdates=0
IsDeferralIsActive=0
Might I suggest you create an Image of your current machine and then run the inplace repair. Then if repair heads south you restore.
I ran repair several times yesterday with no drama. I did have my Images.
Well the repair using MCT is the same thing as I just did to get 1903, I am pretty sure at update time my settings were 0 days as I was trying to get the update through WU, I think I changed it to 7 days the day after.
Question so does home version now have same options as pro as I have home VM here ready to upgrade.
There no rush as even if didn't get fixed it is only 7 days.
Doing a little experiment, it looks like only one key is saving new changes the UX one (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings)
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