Yes, I am seeing a turning away from randomness in evolutionists. The evidence is too strong against randomness already. As you say, at the beginning of this pathway process, I and you believe that there had to be intelligent design. However, the evolutionists seem to be trying to do several things. One is to distance themselves from the question of the origin of life. The second (at least from some of the arguments I have seen on this thread) seems to be that they really want to use the Cambrian explosion when the phyla came about as a starting point for the pathways (but I may be wrong in this).
What I was trying to point out was that for those who adhere to a materialistic explanation for the descent of species, even from such a starting point, there are big problems which cannot be solved by simple means. Yes, perhaps a very involved code could solve all the problems mentioned but then one is going beyond anything which would be possible to claim as a material explanation. Wolfram I believe claims (from what I have read on this and other threads) that complexity can come about as a result of 5-6 simple rules. I think because of the diversity of life it would take a lot of 'tweaking' and thus a lot of code to achieve what we see in living things.
Actually, the requirements for a state machine that can express all possible information structures is even smaller than you apparently think. The smallest Turing Complete "alphabet" that I'm aware of has only TWO operations, and I believe there is more than one of this order. In other words, everything that is possible (e.g. all structures and information constructs that can exist) can be created in a system with only 2 rules as a simple matter of stirring the pot.
This fact generally defies most people's intuition, but is nonetheless true. It is why I don't think getting a bootstrap machine is the hard part.
But the greatest challenge will be determining whether or not it can explain all of biological life and consciousness – over the span of the geological record. That is a tall order indeed, and as tortoise has pointed out post 476, even abiogenesis by autonomous self-organizing complexity nevertheless requires “a semi-stable and suitable environment that lasts long enough for the bootstrap to bootstrap to interesting and better protected structures.”
I do take great comfort in the fact that mathematicians, information theorists and physicists are epistemologically zealous and most of the mathematicians (which includes a huge chunk of the others) are of the Platonist type (albeit weak or naturalized) - who will not rest until it all makes sense.