Not correct. Who the designer is does not matter as to whether something was designed. We can look at a car and know it was designed by some human being without knowing the human beings name or the purpose of his particular design.
ID has no explanatory power at all - absolutely any observation is consistent with it
Not correct either. ID has a tremendous amount of explanatory power and I will give you an example of why it does. For many years after the discovery of DNA scientists kept looking for a cancer 'gene'. They never found it. However, as we learned a little more about how organisms work we realized that it was not a gene that caused cancer, but a process which was somehow not working properly. This process in many cases is the one which controls cell replication. A quite involved process which tells at what point a cell should replicate and at the same time tells the old cell (in older people of course) to commit suicide. So this shows that the Intelligent Design theory led to a solution which had not been looked at because of evolutionary theory insisting on randomness and denying design.
Can you quote an actual researcher saying something like that? Where does design enter into the picture? Isn't the failure to stop replicating controlled by the interaction between the cell's environment and its genome?
You: Not correct. Who the designer is does not matter as to whether something was designed. We can look at a car and know it was designed by some human being without knowing the human beings name or the purpose of his particular design.
I don't follow your analogy. We already know, for a fact, that the car was designed by a person (or persons). We don't know this from looking at a car; we know it because we independently know the history of technology. If an ancient person, (or a New Guinea Cargo Cultist) saw a car, they might very well infer Divine Design.
What are we able to say about this hypothetical designer? All I've seen so far is that it has lousy quality control, and that it likes to mimic Darwinism.
My point was that since design is a purely ad-hoc hypothesis, there are no limitations on what can be imputed to the designer. We could use some independent lines of inquiry here.