A good portion of the tax incentives Amazon would have taken advantage of were through existing programs that any business could use. One of the real incentives offered was probably in the form of cutting down on red tape for construction of the new campus.

I think they were being stupid. Their terrible rhetoric around the issue certainly doesn't imply that they grasped the situation.

If they publicly bemoaned the shakedown from the get-go, but claimed they hsd to participate abyways, they would have improved their negotiating position, and maybe diffused blowback too.