To your points, which are articulately presented, it is no mystery to me why creationists insist upon their position. I’ll explain, momentarily.
If you haven’t it’s so worth the read: Stephen Jay Gould’s classic: “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.” This paper is a hard read, but it is worth your time. In it, he systematically takes apart the conventional thinking on evolution, that creatures adapt and optimize. Instead, he offers a far more nuanced account of the evidence thus far (paper was written in 1979), in which he suspected multiple competing systems within organisms, coexisting with systems that do NOT seem to adapt, and other alternatives, all in a tidy list. His treatment of evolution is a far subtler interpretation than what existed in science in the 1970’s, and remains far subtler than what most people tend to believe now, if they believe in evolution at all.
Back to the original point: not only is evolution invisible to us in terms of physiology and timeline, but it is also realized in piecemeal fashion within the organism and multitudes of organisms, and so is even more invisible, ineffable, beyond our immediate and not-so-immediate grasp. It takes an incredible amount of consideration to understand precisely how it might be working, and even then, the best science might still be totally wrong about the particular system being studied.
It is no wonder to me that creationists are so stubborn with their sham. It’s because they are no match for nature’s own stubbornness.
