Again, I jump into an ongoing conversation with an extraneous question. But I have to ask while you are posting and it's on my mind.
It seems to me that ID would immediately be accepted as mainstream science if it would address one of its underlying assumptions, that the outcome of cnange can be predicted.
It seems to me that when you say something is designed, you imply that the designer knows how something will work before it is actually built. So it would seem that the central mission of ID would be to find the underlying predictive model that allows one to creat new things with knowledge of how their structure will be expressed.
In the case of a living system (an ecology) you would also need a model that predicts the reproductive success of anything new. Otherwise, no matter how clever your design, natural selection would still be the shaper of things.
This has been in the back of my mind since I started reading these threads, but this is the first time I've seen the question clearly as something that could be researched.