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If every creature was this elegantly put together, there might, might, be a case for Inteligent Design. As things are, there isn't.

Perhaps. But given the "it's thriftiest" explanation provided for this "very clean" genome, I think it raises a number of very significant questions with regard to why other genomes have accumulated so much apparently random stuff, if there is some genetic advantage to be gained from this streamlining.

The thing that comes to my mind is: maybe that "random stuff" isn't really random after all, but simply serves some purpose we haven't discovered yet.

But given the "it's thriftiest" explanation provided for this "very clean" genome, I think it raises a number of very significant questions with regard to why other genomes have accumulated so much apparently random stuff, if there is some genetic advantage to be gained from this streamlining.
The thing that comes to my mind is: maybe that "random stuff" isn't really random after all, but simply serves some purpose we haven't discovered yet.

Well, at least some of the random stuff has been proven to be useless to survival. They bred knockout mice, where the knocked out regions were noncoding regions of no previously known function. The mice were indistinguishable from normal mice. I don't know if they ever tried to breed a line of mice from those knockout mice, so I don't know if there are any long-term effects to knocking out that particular line of junk, but it's still rather compelling evidence that much of the noncoding sequences really ARE junk DNA.

Some scientists have speculated that pseudogenes, at least, form a junkyard like those in Junkyard Wars: They provide lots of ready-made subassemblies that can be pressed into service later on.

Then there's the rationale I've thought of for having junk DNA: When a gene duplicates, it gets plopped down in a (presumably) random spot on some chromosome. If there was no junk DNA, then the chance would be 100% that the duplicated gene would "crash" into another already-functioning gene, most likely disabling it. With 95% of our genome being junk, there's only a 5% chance that a gene duplication would disable a currently functioning gene.

So when a genome acquires the capability to produce stretches of junk DNA, it's actually acquiring a buffer zone that acts synergistically to vastly increase the viability of gene duplication as an evolutionary tool.

I think the JennyP Theory of Noncoding DNA explains why most single-celled organisms don't have junk DNA while all(?) multicelled organisms do.

The thing that comes to my mind is: maybe that "random stuff" isn't really random after all, but simply serves some purpose we haven't discovered yet.

I absolutely agree. Medical science has always been quick to dismiss anything they don't understand. Medical science still understands very little about the complexities of the human body. There's a small genetic deletion called VCFS (22q11.2), which can result in 180 different medical problems.

..why other genomes have accumulated so much apparently random stuff, if there is some genetic advantage to be gained from this streamlining.

Of course this idea implies some sort of species conciousness going on during the cellular formation stage and will no doubt attract criticism from everyone but hey, wild thoughts have their place too...

As in the case of the whale, in the event that things don't turn out to be as advantageous on land as you would like, you have the ability to revert much faster if you have saved the codes for the appropriate cellular engines. This ability to "devolve" in a rapid fashion might come in handy should your species suddenly need to survive another ice age.