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Any definitive statement on the origins of this word needs not just to find an early occurrence and say "that's it", but has to do it the way we trace out family tree. Work backwards from now until it disappears.
Only one of the possibles has been traced to a disappearing point, if I can use the phrase, and that's the "Oll Korrect" origin, which began in a humorous mock-illiterate word game in a US newspaper well before Martin Van Buren. The expansion from this source was fully documented by a researcher who wrote an entire book on the matter.
Until someone comes up with an even better origin, and includes a complete paper trail of its growth from that source, the "Oll Korrect" theory still stands as the best documented and most likely.
Of course, an earlier origin and its vector, to use a medical phrase, may have been purely oral, and left no written trail. If that's the case we'll never know. So it is just possible that "okay" was an existing, undocumented word until the Oll Korrect newspaper appearance, and Oll Korrect was backformed from the existing oral okay, but it seems unlikely and is in any case unprovable.
Old Kinderhook does come into it, in the best documented history of the word, not as its creator, but as its reviver.
(I wonder if I'm the only nutter who actually reads dictionaries like novels, starting at page 1? When I bought my 2 volume Shorter OED years ago, I actually did just that. There's not much characterisation, and no plot, but my word, what a vocabulary!)
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