I couldn't agree with Mike Spector [27 Feb 97] more about the need to exercise some disciplined thought about what the barriers to progress are, and how we can overcome them. I took on stab at identifying the barriers in the paper. Perhaps others will be encouraged to try. I think it's high time that we got serious about stewardship of the field. Why should anyone who has a career interest in the field waste their professional development time on anything other than one of the barriers to progress? Would it be too much to ask every journal of theory and research related to the field to publish an article on what its editorial board thinks are the barriers to progress, and to give priority to publishing articles related to those topics (and ask submissions to state which barrier they are addressing)?
I certainly am sympathetic with your frustration over how little real progress there has been in advancing the state of the art in ID, especially over the last decade or so. On the one hand, I am among those who view this as an extremely serious, life-threatening situation for the field. On the other hand, I think a number of good minds are finally working seriously on making ID sense out of the cognitive and constructivist advances in learning theory over the past decade or so. So, I'm also among those who are optimistic that we may be entering another golden age of ID progress. If we all keep focused on the real goal(s), instead of all the distractions.
That said, I certainly agree that the topic of teaching and learning far exceeds in complexity our feeble theories. But I don't agree that progress will be impossible until we have it all figured out. I think there is good research evidence that well-done ID does improve one's instructional "batting average" over a teacher's general-purpose intuition. I also am among those who believe that since ID is an applied field, it always has to deal with the full complexity of real teaching/learning environments and real learners, against which any ID theory comes up short. Therefore, the appropriate stance for an ID practitioner is to be theoretically eclectic, and to use theory to inform or guide practice, but not to dictate it. That's another way of saying that, for the foreseeable future, ID is an inherently moderately-structured task. When good, researched principles exist, we can use them, but we'll still need our analogical and inductive reasoning skills, as well as our rule-governed skills. By the time Majel Barrett* can do ID, we'll all be long gone. (That doesn't make the ID2 quest wrong, just Sysiphean).
*For all you non-Trekkers, Majel Barrett is the voice of the USS Enterprise's central computer on all Star Trek series and movies. Not only does the central computer have full speech and voice comprehension, but it always knows the context of the discussion and when it's being addressed. Unlike my teenage daughters.