I don't have any experience with the dragonfly, but I've had a few fairly similar occurrences when I first started using my Whisperlite. That looked like a lot of fuel for the preheat (or whatever the term is). One of the things I started doing was not fully pumping the bottle until after I did the preheat. Only doing a couple pumps made it a lot easier to not spray too much at first.
You obviously had a huge amount of fuel already there when you dribbled some in else you left the valve open somehow after that. No magic or mystery there. The wick is as it should be. It does have a loose tail. I use kerosene on mine mostly and I just use alcohol on the wick to prime. Kerosene works extremely well on this stove too and even diesel (I have seen used and it works well).
You are supposed to turn the fuel of before you ignite what is in the primer cup, And only after it is almost burned out do you turn the fuel feed back on.
