Hi
I live in France and don't have an Apple Store where I live (just on official reseller, all hardware issues go through a subcontracted company). However I have some progress to report! I simply did a restore (as a new ipad) but going back to the earliest signed version of ios available a few weeks ago: 10.1 (14B72) which predated, by a week or so, my issues with the iPad. I reinstalled everything from scratch, taking care not to put back any apps I didn't use often, (note that I have never had less than 20GB free on my iPad Air 64GB, even before it started going wrong. (i.e. ipad went into recovery mode every time it should have simply gone into standby mode).
And happily, this seems to have fixed my issues. My battery consumption is normal, and it sleeps and wakes normally. It's only been two weeks, but my guess is that it was some sort of hardware driver glitch, preventing the processor from going into normal standby mode. Presumably there is a power management core within the A7 CPU, and this power management unit needs firmware to ensure that the standby modes are entered and exited properly. My best guess is that iOS 10.1.1 was not a good driver for my 2 year old iPad. If it relapses, without me updating my IOS, then I'll be pretty certain that something is borderline with my hardware. Until then, I will not update my IOS. The only casualty is Facebook...I'm not allowed to reinstall the app with 10.1. But I can definitely live without the Facebook app :-)
Good luck to everyone else, and do give your feedback on whether IOS 10.2 has fixed any of these power management issues.