I'm really confused about Lorentz transformations at the moment. In most books on QFT, Special Relativity or Electrodynamics, people talk about Lorentz transformations as some kind of special coordinate transformation that leaves the metric invariant and then they define what they call the Lorentz scalars. But from my point of view (which is somehow grounded in a background from differential geometry), scalars and the metric, which is a tensor, are invariant under any "good" coordinate transformation and that's a lot more than just Lorentz transformations, so I don't see why there's a special role for the Lorentz transformations in special relativity. Saying that the metric is invariant under Lorentz transformations is non-sense to me, because indeed it should be under any type of coordinate transformation if it's a well defined metric on a Minkowski manifold.
It seems to me that Lorentz transformations should be relating observers (frames) and not coordinate systems - that would make more sense to me, but usually people mix both concepts as if they were exactly the same. I'd like to understand what it means when one says that some scalar is Lorentz invariant. If someone could clarify me this conceptual confusion, I would be really grateful.
I think the basic reason not to identify Lorentz transformations with general coordinate transformations(which is the Diff(M) symmetry in GR in the absence of a background spacetime symmetry and therefore it is considered a gauge symmetry)is the presence of a constant curvature background of which the Poincare group is the isometry group and the Lorentz transformations the subgroup of it that fixes the origin. I'm not sure what you mean by Special relativity not relating frames, that's actually what boosts do.
A lorentz scalar is just an invariant quantity constructed from other Lorentz invariant objects like 4-momentum or magnitudes of 4-vectors.