The following ramblings are just night thoughts kicked off by your question (and so should really be a comment, but I am not entitled) which I am posting in the hope that they may be of interest to you.
Firstly, your operator $K$ has more properties than you mention. It is not just a right inverse—it is, as near as can be, also a left inverse, just missing this by one dimension. This fact was used by Sebastião e Silva to give an elementary construction of the space of distributions on $[0,1]$—it takes half a page and only uses methods and results of a freshman univariate analysis course (see the site jss100.campus.ciencias.ulisboa.pt). At a less elementary level, it is an integral operator (a functional analytical property stronger than compactness) and this is the reason that the above space of distributions is nuclear (Grothendieck).
In the case of self-adjoint operators (which yours isn't but see below), the situation is quite transparent: there is a duality via inversion between suitable compact s.a. operators on a separable Hilbert space and unbounded s.a. ones with discrete spectrum and eigenvalues $(\lambda_n)$ which diverges to infinity in absolute value. (By the way, the inverse is nuclear iff $\sum \frac {1}{|\lambda_n|}<\infty$.) One can then ape Sebastião e Silva‘s construction in this more sophisticated context to obtain a unified approach to most of the distribution spaces of relevance in mathematical physics (typical candidates for the seed operator—Laplace, Laplace-Beltrami, Schrödinger).
One can recover information on the relation between a general (i.e., not necessarily self-adjoint) compact operator $A$ and a (one-sided) inverse $K$ by looking at the related s.a. operators obtained by multiplying them by their adjoints.