That is what I thought till I started talking to ID people at the center of this episode. The issue is that the Discovery Institute, from the beginning, opposed Dover. There is some good evidence for this too. It seems that the school board and the lawyers involved had gone rouge, and had put forward this as a test case even though it was a horrible test case for ID. The lawyer was dreaming of a Scopes redo, but Discovery was running for the hills. Behe was the only one that agreed to do expert testimony, and he did so against the advice of Discovery. So Dover was a mess from the beginning, not the intended plan of Discovery.
However, alongside Dover, concurrently, there was the Kansas Board of Education Hearings. This is the circus that Discovery wanted, and often still put forward as a positive example of their work. Within science, we generally collapse Dover and Kansas into the same event, but they were understood as separate events by Discovery. Dover was the wrong way to do it. Kansas was the right way. They seem to have been making this point through the whole period too.
That is why they often say it is unfair to be linked to Dover. In their view, Discovery did not want the disaster than happened for them: ID being ruled to be creationism. They saw it coming but could not get control of the situation. The Kansas Hearings were a public circus too, even more of one in many ways, but did not carry that same risk. Also they controlled the exchange, not the court system.
In my view Kansas is just as bad spectacle as Dover. There is no reason to dispute what seems to be part of the public record. Discovery opposed Dover, but stage crafted Kansas. Sociologically they were linked, but they were still separate events. If you do things like Kansas, you should expect things like to Dover to take place too.