That was a very well thought out post. However, beware of the term "irreducible complexity". That is a term that sounds good but has no meaning and is not used. That which is complex can always be reduced to another level. While there is an expansion of knowledge that can be hard to sort out initially, such as in molecular biology, what is really going on is simplification - a reduction of complexity.
I guess the way I'm thinking of it, and this might be wrong, is that you have a set of operations (genetic mutations) that are "atomic" in some strange biological sense of the word. I would guess that they would include adding one "atomic" unit to a gene sequence, removing one, and probably combining two gene sequences in some way and also splitting them in some way, and then the question would be whether there was a path of these "atomic" operations from proposed ancestral genes to current genes and stuff like that.
I doubt this kind of analysis could even be done right now, but I'm not knowledgeable enough in genetics or evolutionary biology to say for sure that it couldn't.
Anyways, that's what I think of when ID proponents start talking about irreducable complexity. Maybe that's not even what they mean, but I think that would be a very worthwhile analysis if we knew enough about genetics and biology to do it. I am more confident in saying that this hasn't been done YET, so when ID folks say that this irreducable complexity analysis supports ID, I have trouble taking them seriously. In any case, such analyses as have been done are not nearly compelling enough to make a case to "teach controversy" over something that is, as far as I've seen, not at all scientifically controversial.