I agree with your basic point here.
Philosophical issues play a very limitted role.
However, ID does not have to WAIT for either turn of events in order to enter the discussion. The more speculative the naturalistic explanations, and the stronger the scientific objections, the stronger the case is for adopting the ID-paradigm. But the lion's share of the decision is still based upon shared scientific intuition over the adequacy of naturalistic explanations. It's an interesting idea. Some enzymes work this way, but a great many proteins and genes have multiple targets and multiple functions.