The dreaded Samsung Galaxy WIFI authentication error with ORBI

Update - day two: Still working.

I'm starting to believe that there are several things that are happening and there's a certain amount of "bad luck" that has to happen when you add your Wi-Fi network to your phone. If you happen to get a "bad" connection during setup, it will give you the intermittent "authentication" problem until you forget the connection. However, you have a certain percentage chance of getting this "bad" connection setup each time you try, so just like flipping a coin, where you can get 10 heads in a row, you can get another bad connection after forgetting / re-adding, so the key is to keep removing / re-adding the network until the problem goes away. It's fairly likely that forgetting and re-adding once or twice or three times won't be enough.

The main take away is, "If first you don't succeed, try, try, (try, try, try, try...) again."

I just wish it was more definite than that, and I wish I had some understanding of what can be done to have a better chance of getting a "good" connection from the start. I wish there was a good way of getting Samsung to put in the work to identify and fix the problem. I wish...I had million dollars. :-)

I've seen a similar issue with file transfers using encryption where there was a mismatch in the implementation of the algorithm negotiated for security. In this case, IF a particular algorithm picked and AND the data just happened to have a certain special character then negotiation failed, and, therefore, the authentication failed, but if the data in the negotiation didn't have the special character then it worked. However, in that case, this was happening on a server where I had verbose debugging information and could see all the details. Unfortunately, the issue was deep in some 3rd party drivers that I had no control over, but, fortunately, the remote vendor changed protocols and the new algorithms in the new protocol were much more reliable.

Working backwards from what I'm seeing, it's almost as if Samsung caches which algorithm was successful in negotiation at the time of setup (maybe to save time on subsequent connections? Maybe it only advertises that one "good" algorithm as compatible?) and unfortunately picks one that's not reliably successful but just happens to work on that first try. What doesn't feel right to me is why that wouldn't be renegotiated fully each time or how it would ever settle on a better algorithm. Without logging tools to see exactly where and why the "authentication" is failing, as well as what algorithm was used, it's going to hard to collect any useful evidence to present to Samsung. Anyone know of an easy, non-root, way to add this level of debugging to the Android wi-fi connection?

Regardless, don't settle on "I tried the forget / re-add on my phone and it didn't fix the problem." because it might take many times to get it right - at least, that's how it's looking for me. Again, I'll update in a few more days, just to see if the "fix" sticks.