Metaphysical ideas are simply obsolete and fruitless and simplistic ways to think about the ultimate nature of reality, rendered hopelessly irrelevant by what we now have uncovered about it by scientific, ie systematic and open, investigations, having long exhausted the capacities of the human mind by itself, ie when not inspired by the deeply counter-intuitive ideas thrown up by our ever-deeper digging into the indefinitely complex and subtle reality of matter and energy...

Quantum and Relativity theories were just the start - 

God-creators are simply primitive holdovers from our ancient past, where our propensity to see purposeful agency everywhere populated our imagination with gods and demons and endless variations on the theme.

It is time to grow up.

Throw out your Bibles and Korans and Upanishads and so on, and 'get real'.

OK, hang on to them for their story-telling value - we also have  a deep need for telling ourselves stories, exercising our imagination unconstrained by strict reality.

Most of us cannot be deeply involved at the cutting edge of science, but it can inspire even more fresh narratives to entertain and inspire us, and hopefully distract us from our petty squabbles over diminishing resources, and possibly provide hope for keeping our 'civilization' going a little longer.

A few commenta specifically on points in the OP:

I have been frequently amazed at how many apparently smart scientists do still cling to some form of God belief. Nowhere near a majority of course, but there are a number around like Francis Collins.

I am not so surprised these days, having a better grasp at the way people think.

The Universe exhibits complex interacting elements, some things which some people associate with stuff we create, not seen outside our culture/society. To call these 'elements of design' is begging the question.

We see everyday complex systems arise from far simpler components - trees grow from tiny seeds, so growing complexity, emergence, is an everyday occurrence.

The anthropic principle has not been "verified". We do not know enough about all the possible ranges of values those 'constants' could actually take meaningfully, with what probability distribution, to even guess at an actual likelihood of something like our universe emerging from some random shuffle, let alone get much idea about what other combinations of values could support a viable universe with some persistent complex form of organism.

I don't think it is even possible to test the anthropic principle. How do you go about setting up a set of experimental mini-universes with different physical constants and watch what happens over a billion years or so?

Creationists accuse us of not being able to 'experimentally test evolution' , and then someone wants to claim some speculation like this which they see as supporting the nonsense that is God is experimentally testable in some sense?? WTF??

Religious beliefs corrupt reason.

I guess I see that those basic ideas, especially about the nature of strings, etc, are more appropriately and productively considered under the framework of mathematics, and at that edge of science where it can be considered to be touching on more speculative areas which are typically seen as more part of philosophy than science. The 'Philosophy of Science' should incorporate/encompass much that would traditionally been addressed by metaphysics.

I follow many discussions on a collection of podcasts which I have come to value, which between them cover this whole area, as I see it. I see no value in any separate 'discipline' or study area of 'metaphysics', rather all the stuff at the fringe of 'solid' science, shading off into the more purely speculative, conceptual realms should be kept together as far as possible.

I honestly see no value or need for 'metaphysics' itself, at least as it comes across from older contexts. In my repeated experience, with occasional exceptions, philosophers, in the more traditional sense,  show less grasp of the broader implications of modern science than many of the more 'philosophically' inclined, for want of a better term, scientists. Partly because they seem to be more inclined to hang onto old concepts which, to me, are definitely past their 'use by' date, and are simply inadequately informed on the actual theories.

Of course I almost certainly think of what metaphysics refers to and what it considers differently from your understanding of it.

This is vital to allow an active exchange of ideas both ways, so the 'metaphysics' doesn't drift too far away into the fantasyland of Plato and Co, and can be informed by the real insights of science only accessible from empirical investigation, and in turn can keep suggesting different ways to conceptualize the more abstract aspects of our developing models of reality. 

I have recently been following a podcast which Massimo Pigliucci is a regular host, and I do like him, but even there I detected a leaning toward Philosophy which I felt he showed just a little too much deference to the discipline for my liking.

One of my main objections to metaphysics and much of Philosophy - they carry too much 'baggage' from really outmoded ways of thinking, they pay far too much respect to the ideas of prominent historical figures in the field.

OK but metaphysics has the same concept behind it as supernatural. Philosophers may disagree but they are mostly full of bunk in this area.

There are things which are the study of the natural world. Pretty much what we can see or reason from evidence. Protons come to mind here. Nobody can or will ever see a proton but we have sufficient evidence that they are real.

We call that stuff physics.

Then there is stuff that has no actual evidence to establish that it is real. It is in the realm of thought. We call that metaphysics or supernatural.

OK Luminon, you actually hit on something there. There is a bit of a dirty (but open) secret of science.

Let me tell it this way:

Every generation has young scientists who come up with stuff that old scientists refuse to accept. Given that old scientists have built their lives on what they do, that much is not unexpected.

Eventually, the old scientists die and the younger ones grow up. Then, the stuff that the younger guys came up with is no longer being blocked. Given that they had a couple of decades to think about stuff, whatever really did turn out to be wrong will be dropped but the stuff that did happen to be right becomes new additions to science.

The problem really is that by this time, they are old scientists and they really don't want to have truck with the crap that the new crop of young scientists have going on. Which is actually fine because lots of the stuff on the cutting edge will eventually turn out to be wrong.

Got that much?

There is a humorous observation that is relevant here:

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Well Luminon, the bleeding edge of scientific inquiry has lots of ideas. Often there will be several ideas that contradict each other so they obviously can't all be right. Twenty years from now, if we are lucky, we will find out which one was the real deal (or possibly it will happen that none of them were but another idea that has yet to come forward will turn out to be it).

For example, right now, there are multiple confirmed observations that say that the universe is expanding faster than the current models allow for. There are at least eight explanations out there. The best that we can say is something called “dark energy” which is really a bullshit place holder for “we don't know what is going on”.

As far as contemporary magic goes, that would depend on what you accept as magic.

The example I cite here is that a couple of years ago, there was an enormously popular TV show where the host claimed to talk to the dead. In order to get in, you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement as thick as a phone book and you had about three seconds to decide.

Basically, if you wanted to hear that your dead grandfather wishes you the best of luck, you had to agree that if you ever told anyone about the scam they were pulling, you agreed to a summary judgment so large that your grand kids would be left still paying them off.

If you watched the show, it seemed that they guy was cold reading the audience. However, the truth did come out despite the gigantic legal document. He was not even cold reading. He was getting enough people to tape five episodes in the studio for a single day. He would have them gather in a cafeteria to wait to be let in the actual studio.

How much would you be willing to bet that people being left to cool out would talk to each other and say “I really hope that he can talk to my uncle George”? That woulf have been caught on hidden microphones and handed to the host.