When I marked the page I saw absolutely no edit conflict but I detected that this was your edit that was saved and not mine only by looking later in the history. Anyway this occured in the very early time were you started this thread and at that ti,e there was still NO translation (except my own French translation) and a few Japanese ones started just after this. So nothing was really lost in limbos. So all this is one of those long lasting synchronization bug of the translate tool.
Note: I really NEVER remove the special "T:id" tags (unless this is an entirely unrelated content replacing old contents or the content is fully reorganized) and get sure that this did not occur when I saved that page to add the tvar and mark it.
Sometimes I will split a single translation unit into multiple ones (notably long bulleted lists or lists whose items are a full paragraphe with co,plete sentences, or exapndable lists of items that will grow over time, such as lists of links to projects, references, "see also" sections, or multi-level list ..: I much prefer splitting the list with separate items (moving the initial bullets outside the translate unit) with the additional benefit that it hels the transaltio memory and they are much easier to edit individually in the translate interface.