Well, let's hold the favorite beverages. Now that I have my senses back after my initial shock and happiness, I am realizing that certain usage patterns still fail to force kate to grab the focus.
With my existing profile, when I launch kate for the first instance through selecting a document in konqueror, then thereafter kate raises and grabs focus. And that was pretty much the extent of my previous testing.
Now I discover when I open kate from my task bar icon, which has the --use parameter, or the mini cli (Alt-F2), and kate is configured with useInstance=true, and then open a document from konqueror into kate, kate will not raise forward or grab focus.
Even drag-and-drop will not force kate forward with the focus.
So seems my solution works great but only when used in a specific manner. The nominal consolation is that is still better than what I had previously.
I might have found a workaround.
I set my global Focus stealing prevention level to Low (KControl, Desktop, Window Behavior, Focus tab).
For kate, from the title bar, select Advanced, Special Application Settings, select the Workarounds tab, then set Focus stealing prevention to Force/None.
For me, along with the patch, kate now works the way I want.
I haven't tested SDI.
Darrell