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Yeah, I don't think it is related to Admin Tools but rather Joomla caching.

Go to System, Global Configuration, System. In the Cache area there's a “Platform Specific Caching” option. Set it to No and click on Save & Close.

If that helped, please tell me if you are also using the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. If my understanding is correct, the combination of these two mutually exclusive caching philosophies would very likely cause a problem similar to what you describe.

First, I have had a strange situation where some of our articles at Believer.com echo the "Error—Save failed with the following error:" but no error number, just a blank. 

While this is impossible to accurately debug without having a copy of the site on a development server with a debugger attached, I can think of two reasons why this might be the case.

You said these are pretty old articles, coming from Joomla! 1.5. Many migration tools from that era missed the fact that all Joomla! articles need an asset record (a record in #__assets) and did not create one. This will, indeed, make the save fail. What you are doing with the double save does work.

Another possibility is that you have set up Workflows which somehow prevent saving articles. This could also be in combination with the previous issue, since Workflows need the asset record to operate.

Would you start looking to port sites from Joomla to WordPress, or do you think we are safe for years to come? 

Absolutely not.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumours of Joomla's death have been highly exaggerated. You know, I have been hearing that Joomla is dying and will cease to exist in a couple of years ever since 2006. Eighteen years later, Joomla! is still doing fine… and people still tell me that it will cease to exist in a couple of years.

You have to understand two things.

The first thing is that something being popular doesn't mean it's good. I always use McDonald's as an example. Insanely popular in the USA, but I would never call its food "good" as far as nutritious value, taste, or texture goes. I would always, one hundred percent go to a regular, sit-down restaurant which makes real food. Side note: don't take this as a European dissing the US, my wife's from the USA, and we do come to the USA as frequently as we come :)

The second thing is the "grass is always greener on the other side" fallacy. Some people had built terrible sites in Joomla!, using extensions which have long stopped being updated, and which were not ported to Joomla! 4, for good reason: Joomla!, especially since version 3.7, rendered many of them obsolete by providing very useful core features, the single most important one being Fields a.k.a. custom fields. These people realised that no matter what, they have to rebuild their sites. Which is where we get to the fallacy. They mistakenly think that using a different platform will "magically" make things easier and require less maintenance going forward, reducing the time and money they spend. Are they ever wrong…

There are a few reasons why life as a WordPress site owner isn't better than that of a Joomla! site's owner:

• The “forever compatibility” myth pushed by WordPress is just that: a myth. Like all good myths it has a kernel of truth, embellished with brazen lies. Sure enough, the content will survive upgrades from one version of WordPress to the next – but so does Joomla's since Joomla! 2.5 was released twelve years ago. Plugins will mostly work, unless they are not updated for the changes in WordPress' API, or new PHP versions, or new features in WordPress – just like Joomla! extensions. And yeah, WordPress does make changes in its API, sometimes horribly breaking ones, worse than the worst Joomla! had ever done. If you don't believe me, read this: https://www.akeeba.com/news/1762-abwp-810-is-manual-update.html Can you believe that they made a change which would break plugin updates in such a way that addressing it would require time travel on the part of plugin developers? Me neither, but it did happen!
• WordPress as a core product is very basic. You can't even configure email sending via SMTP. Everything you need requires a plugin. As a result, the myth that WordPress is fast is just that: a myth. WordPress without any plugins is actually twice as Joomla! 5.1 without extensions on the same server. Add plugins (which are loaded on every single page load, even if it's a backend only plugin like Akeeba Backup!) and WordPress is dog slow.
• Which brings me to the fact that WordPress out of the box has no caching. You need to provide your own plugin for caching. The top caching plugins are at about the state of technology development Joomla's caching was when Joomla! 1.5 was released in 2007. If that seventeen year old technology sounds abysmal and slow, yes, it is.
• People rave about the block editor, but it's just a page builder. Page builders let you create a visually interesting page really fast, but when you decide to change the layout (template / theme) of your site you need to go back and redo all content, making site maintenance a nightmare. Unlike Joomla where page builders are an optional, third party extra, WordPress' block editor is the ONLY content editor you get.
• The block editor situation gets worse. It stores the block configuration data as JSON strings in HTML comments inline the content. Because of that, when block plugins are updated and this JSON content needs to be upgraded, upgrade is impossible without going through all the content, so it doesn't happen. When you try to display or edit the content with old, incompatible JSON data you get one of these problems: it reverts to plain HTML content, it reverts to an unconfigured block (loss of content), or it causes a PHP error. Which, of course, means that site maintenance now has to contend with a time bomb.
• The cost of WordPress plugins is astronomical. It is usually charged per year, per site at prices which are three to five times more expensive than equivalent Joomla! extensions. To give you an idea, rebuilding our site in WordPress would cost well over 3000 Euros per year in plugin fees, and would have to forego half of the features we have built in. The equivalent price on Joomla! is a hair under 250 Euros per year, assuming that we'd be paying someone else for our own software used on our site.

The way I see it, WordPress sites are great if you want to cobble together a short-lived marketing site, or you have planned to throw away and rebuild the site in the next site refresh cycle 3-5 years into the future.

Which is exactly why all these people who went WordPress crazy back when Joomla! 2.5 went End of Life a decade ago came back to Joomla! three to five years later.

Now we have another wave of people who are going to WordPress seeing that their Joomla! 3 sites need to be rebuilt. They will be back in 3 to 5 years.

Besides, there's the elephant in the root nobody talks about: there is no alternative to Joomla!. On one end of the spectrum we have WordPress, WiX, SquareSpace etc which allow people with minimal to no experience in web development to create visually compelling sites, with all the drawbacks I mentioned. On the other end of the scale we have Drupal, Laravel, Symfony etc which allow hardcore backend developers to create insanely powerful applications. However, most people belong in the middle. What's in the middle? Joomla!. It sits alone on the island of "good enough". It's good enough that people with a moderate skill set can use it to create visually compelling sites, and good enough that developers can use it to create fairly powerful applications. It's good enough that you can purchase off the shelf software and templates to create this kind of sites with a slightly steeper learning curve than a point-and-click page builder, but without having to be a hardcore developer writing reams of PHP code. This is what most site integrators need.

And that's why I am sticking with Joomla! for my sites.

My only concern about CMS in general is that younger people (Gen Z) don't seem interested in web development like us Gen X / Millenials used to (I was born in 1981, on the cusp of both generations, I could be called either). This is a threat not just to every CMS out there, but the web in general. If there's one thing we all ought to do is get younger people interested in web development, because that's humanity's best solution to the age-long quest of sharing knowledge.

As we used to say in the old web, sorry for the long reply, here's a potato 🥔

Thank you for your kind words :)

Go to the Configure WAF page, Customisation. Check "Show errors using a customisable HTML template". When this is set to No, bot / malicious request blocking takes place by raising a PHP exception. This prevents Joomla from caching anything when the request is blocked by Admin Tools. Note that Joomla itself also raises exceptions when something suspicious is taking place, i.e. it won't cache anything. I just re-tested it to make sure I remember correctly; it seems that I do.

Since you are using Scala, try to NOT use the Litespeed Cache. I've seen many weird issues on different sites go away as soon as this cache was disabled across different hosts.