Strange Bluetooth issue (MFT) (Maybe solved?)

After 18 months of flawless operation, my Bluetooth phone connection recently started giving me trouble. It would randomly disconnect me and the audio quality during calls was terrible (heavy static/breaking up). I couldn't help but think these problems were related.

I have an iPhone 6 running up to date iOS (but did not change recently).

My MFT has the latest update (but not recently).

One thing I did start to do when this was happening was listen to baseball games using the MLB At Bat app through the Bluetooth connection. I would often get poor performance with this, with the phone disconnecting but then still some random bits of the feed coming through.

I though that perhaps the app was confusing the system so I shut down the app (I guess it "runs" in the background) and restarted the phone. For good measure I performed a Master Reset.

Same problem persisted.

I could sometimes but only rarely get it to reconnect by manually connecting (in the phone quadrant). I found that sometimes if I took my phone out and turned the Bluetooth off and then on it would connect.

Then I hypothesized that somehow the location of the phone in my pocket in proximity to my key and the key to my wife's car might have been affecting the connection (wasn't a problem before but I was desperate).

Since I've been putting the phone in the little tray in front of the shifter it has been connecting fine, staying connected, and audio quality is back where it should be.

I suppose you could say the problem is solved, but I wonder if there isn't an underlying issue with the phone or with the car than precipitated this odd new behaviour.

Anyone else experienced this? If you're still reading this long post, thank you!