1) Darwin was the original gradualist. He flirted a little with catastrophism and scenarios that look a bit like punctuated equilibrium but that was mostly a later refinement by Gould and Eldridge. Darwin spent a lot of time wondering why things didn't look like an unbroken continuum everywhere. He's out of date in that regard, but you're not much ahead of him. He has the excuse that he's been dead since the 1880s.
2) The "plants first" model is just about dead, whether or not you think the first animals came out of RNA World. If you don't know that RNA World is, I wouldn't be too surprised.