It's a bug, plain and simple.
If you can render with Previews directly (which works), thenn you should be able to do the same in AME.
I use this all the time when I'm testing noise reduction/vfx on clips. I might make previews of a few sections with reduction applied, then pre render previews. Sometime I'll set AME to import into project, so that have a stack of tests, or finals. This can be a very quick way of pre-rendering compared to queuing clips up individually. Just remember to purge you Previews, and set the sequence Preview to a higher quality codec.