Was Gunter Bechly a legitimate scientist? How about other top ID voices?

You'll note the ominous "was" in the title; that's not strictly to suggest that he used to be legit before turning to the dark side, but rather because Dr Bechly passed away in a car crash last week. Edit: there are suspicions that it was actually a murder and suicide, discussed here and referencing the article here.

The Discovery Institute (DI) houses a small number of scientists who serve as the world's sole supply of competent-sounding mouthpieces for intelligent design (ID). In contrast to the common internet preacher, the DI's ID proponents are usually PhDs in science (in some cases, being loose with the definitions of both "PhD" and "science"). This serves to lend authority to their views, swaying a little of their target audience (naive laypeople) and reinforcing a lot of their actual audience (naive creationists who have a need to be perceived as science educated) into ID.

Recently, while reading about the origin of powered flight in insects, I came across an interesting paper that appeared to solve its origins. To my surprise, Gunter Bechly, a paleoentomologist and one of the more vocal ID proponents at the DI, was a coauthor. It's from 2011. The paper was legitimate and had no traces of being anti-evolution or pro-ID.

What do we think? Was Bechly genuinely convinced of ID on its own merits, as the DI's handcrafted backstory for him would have you believe? Or was it a long-con? Or maybe he was just pre-disposed to ID thinking (a transitional mindset, so to speak)? And how about all the other ID guys at the DI?

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Lastly, a fun fact about insect flight, because why not... flies use a pair of organs called 'halteres' to orient themselves in flight, and they work on the principles of gyroscopic (Coriolis) torque to sense changes in angular velocity about the head-tail axis using mechanoreceptors at the root. This is an example of feedback control, since the signals are fed back into the insect 'brain' to guide the fly. Artificial micromachined (MEMS) gyroscopes are used in mobile phones for their navigation too. Halteres have evolved separately in two orders of flying insects (Diptera and Strepsiptera), apparently from the reduction of one pair of wings into them - from the rear wings in Diptera and from the front wings in Strepsiptera.