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Hi! I attempted to replicate the issues you are seeing by creating a brand new CentOS 7 droplet using your cloud-init configuration (adding my own ssh-key and password but otherwise changing nothing).
Immediately after creation I was able to log in using the root account ssh key that I provided via the UI to watch cloud-init.log as the rest of the process completed with no errors.
I was then able to log in as the user jsmith using the key I provided.
The only thing that I can think of as a potential cause of the problem you encountered is if your ssh-key included any linebreaks that could cause the config to be parsed incorrectly.