I don't know how anyone can be honest and sweep this under the rug as if it doesn't matter. If we can find fossil evidence from millions of years ago, and of supposedly divergent lines, why do we not have anything to link these divergent lines? It seems improbable that this evidence would be the only stuff that left no sign of itself over the eons. When I bring up the lack of fossil evidence to the pure evolutionists, they go on about retro-virus this and DNA that, but fail to come up with a good explanaition of why there are gaps that would infer that there was no real evolving, but a sudden leap of a mutation from one species to the next. It seems that they take the lack of necessity of this linking evidence with the same faith that I attribute to God. Then, they tend to sneer and look down their noses at me as some kind of bumpkin (much as Dims do to anyone who disagrees with them) while they rant about how I don't understand science. I guess I could use the same argument about them not understanding God, but He prefers I not curl my lip when I try to persuade folks of His existence.
I don't think that anyone is trying sweep anything under the rug, primarily because science has indentified dozens if not hundreds of fossils that they believe track the transition from amphibian to reptile, and from reptile to mammal or bird. Some of them are detailed here.
We have lots of transitional fossils. In fact, Darwin's theory predicted they must exist in order for the theory to be correct, although they hadn't been found in his time. One of the hallmarks of a theory is the ability to make predictions. What predictions does ID make?