You are correct that a 'hands off' God (as well as an apathetic God that completely ignores us, or a clueless God that doesn't even realize we exist) Qualifies as ID. The problem is that there is no scientific evidence of any 'tweaks', let alone of an intelligence behind the original creation of the universe. Further, there is no practical scientific value in choosing to believe that goddidit whenever we face an unanswered question.
So, while I personally lean towards a Deist perspective philosophically and thus technically acknowledge the possibility of an Intelligent Designer on that level, for all scientific purposes that belief is irrelevant. The evidence speaks for itself, and it says that evolution is the design and natural selection coupled with genetic drift is the designer. Pretending that ID is a valid alternative way to view the evidence about how life developed just to support a philosophical belief is a dishonest waste of time.
Not as ID is defined by the proponents of the movement. They assert that certain features of life, like the bacterial flagellum, could only come about by direct supernatural intervention.
That's quite a different thing from infering the existence of God from the inherent order we observe in the constants of nature, the anthropic principle, etc.
Seeking truth is never a waste of time. I would agree that interpreting ANY evidence in a way to support any preconcieved idea is incorrect... whther that idea be that there is no creator or there is.
IF, it could ever be found that a pattern emerges which indicates an intelligent designer, however, I do not think it would be worthless. Patterns of things, often hypothetical imaginary things, are quite often used by the scientific community to make intuitive leaps in scientific thought. Quantum Physics is a good example. Nearly everything in quantum physics is hypothetical interpolation of patterns of behavior from very scant and non-existant hard evidence. But since half of what Stephen Hawkings (just one of many examples) talks about is purely imaginary, why isn't the scientific community trying to block HIS ideas from exploration?