I have had this problem too, and participate in the other thread. I've been working with apple advanced support for the week trying to troubleshoot and get to the bottom of the issue. Loading profiles and sending them log files.
One of the elements of the testing is to capture a log snapshot when it happens.. on my phone 6s (yes 6s) this is done by pressing the sleep/wake button and the two volume rockers simultaneously (there is a haptic feedback when doing this) and this writes a time stamp or log flag to the ever growing log file that I send over.
that said, what I HAVE found out while doing this process is that by DOING this funky action, it RECONNECTS the airpods nearly EVERY TIME.
so give that a shot next time and see if it works. This shouldn't be required, but till we get to v1.0.1 at least for FW, some of us may just have to live with the issue.
I'm hoping that is isn't something to do with the BT radio on the 6s, or with the actual pair of airpods that I have (having given away five pair as xmas gifts it would be pretty ironic if MY pair were the bad pair)
We'll solve it soon enough though i believe. The folks I have been working with are very professional.