I was having this same problem today. I’m a newbie at Kafka and was simply trying to get a sample Java producer and consumer running. I was able to get the consumer working, but kept getting the same “topic not present in metadata” error as you, with the producer.
Finally, out of desperation, I added some code to my producer to dump the topics. When I did this, I then got runtime errors because of missing classes in packages jackson-databind and jackson-core. After adding them, I no longer got the “topic not present” error. I removed the topic-dumping code I temporarily added, an it still worked.