Why is the Intelligent Designer so inept?

There doesn't have to be a trade off. The cephalopod eye works just fine with a forward facing retina. Go here for more information.

Your question was simply misguided.It was either in this thread or in another where I talked about stages of development being built on top of one another. This is another case of just that. The inverted retina is one of the earliest stages of development. Since it's evolution this stage has been built upon by other stages. Because of this it is very, very difficult to change the earliest stages of development without disturbing the entire system.This is by no means an "evolutionary dead end". It is a foundation upon which further evolutionary adaptations have been built. Once these changes become the foundation they are really, really hard to change through evolutionary mechanisms.And I also notice that you completely avoided my Bill Gates analogy. I think it is obvious to everyone that putting the wires in front of the light path is just wrong. It is a clear case of ineptitude. This is made even plainer when cameras (or eyes) have been designed with the wires exiting out the back of the photoreceptors. So the designer was purposefully inept? I coach little league baseball. I can cheer for a kid who tries his hardest but doesn't make a play. However, I absolutely hate it when kids don't try and make bad plays. What you are describing is a designer who just isn't trying.

That would imply that the designer is limited in both time and resources. For an all knowing, all powerful supernatural deity who lives in a realm outside of time and space this wouldn't seem to be the case. Making something perfect or imperfect would take the same amount of non-effort. Also, you wouldn't think that such a being would need to make "trade-offs", especially given the fact that this same designer was able to make the cephalopod eye without these trad-offs.

Good point.So if we are to judge the designer by the design (assuming a single designer) we can come to two strong conclusions.1. The designer is not all knowing nor all powerful. Using eyes as an example, the designer learned from it's mistakes with the backwards retina of vertebrates and perfected the design in cephalopods.2. The designer chose to insert inept designs on purpose, and arbitrarily. Going back to the eyes, the designer knew that the backwards facing retina would cut down on light capturing and resolution but decided to do it anyway.

In a similar thread I proposed that there was a designer for each species. The designing was done in a "Chinese Telegraph" type of system where each species was handed off to the next designer who then made a new species in complete isolation from other designers and other designs. Also, each designer is limited to about a 0.5% change in DNA. This is the only way I can see that a design scheme can produce the nested hierarchy that we see.In this scenario, the number of inept designers goes down. An inept design that is not immediately fixed will become standard in that design pathway so it only requires one inept designer out of every 20 or so. At the same time, if each designer is isolated they can not make changes that will take several "speciation" events to come to fruition. This means that a designer can not make a 0.5% DNA change towards a forward facing vertebrate eye if the total DNA change needed is 20%. They are trying to pound a square peg through a round hole. I agree.

If this were true then we would expect fish to have the same type of eye as squid, but they don't. Fish have the same inverted retina that terrestrial tetrapods have. That is why it is called the VERTEBRATE eye, the eye that evolved in the ancestral lineage of all vertebrates.And this adds another observation that you must explain. Why would a designer be forced to use the same eye for every animal that also has a backbone? Why is there this relationship between bones in the back and the eye? Wouldn't a designer be free to mix and match eyes and bones?