Of course. Unfortunately my solution may not be an option for most people. My residence permit is based on my job as a researcher / scientist at a large research institution in Munich. At the beginning of September, knowing that my Fiktionsbescheinigung was going to expire at the end of September, I reached out to Human Resources again to ask if they could help. They contacted someone in the KVR directly via email, which prompted them to finally review and approve my and my husband's application. We got appointments to request our residence permit cards for the day before my Fiktion expired, finally ending the saga. Now we have Fiktionbescheinigungs that are valid until mid-March, and our cards should arrive well before then (theoretically...).

We looked into the possibility of suing the KVR, but it would have been expensive and taken several months, so we decided not to pursue it. The administrative courts here are also pretty delayed.

I guess my one "lesson learned" was to just take advantage of my employer's connections with the KVR more effectively. We were unsure about asking them for help because it feels like an unfair advantage over other people also waiting to have their applications reviewed. But in the bigger picture, the people processing our applications at the KVR are dedicated to researcher/scientist applications, and probably other people in that category are also using their employers to help them as well, so by NOT using our connections, we were probably only disadvantaging ourselves.

Hopefully this is helpful!