[blowfish]

But the nature of the designer is NOT what is at issue

It's absolutely what's at issue. The people who are stridently shoving the ID garbage at us are not research scientists, they are religious types. I don't think they are contending (or would support the idea) that an ancient race of unfeeling super-machines created DNA.
Since they haven't offered a particle of evidence that ID is anything more than psuedo-intellectual wankery, all we have to consider is the nature of the alleged designer.

[RightInEastLansing]

"Since they haven't offered a particle of evidence that ID is anything more than psuedo-intellectual wankery, all we have to consider is the nature of the alleged designer."

Your very existence lends volumes of support to the ID hypothesis.

Stop worrying so much about the religious implications of ID and open your eyes to the astonishing refutation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that might have occured so many millennia ago