Apathetic Creationism

[TolkienFan]

I don't like it. The concept of Open or Apathetic Creationism bespeaks an underlying distrust of hard-nosed data.

No, it does not. It simply bespeaks a lack of care or lack of perceived need to come to definite conclusions about the data.

You can go about saying Genesis might be literal or even quasi-literal, but that strongly implies things like human-caused death and a global flood have equally sufficient amounts of evidence compared to modern geology and biology. They actually don't even come close. It's a lazy straddling of the fence. Changing "apathetic" to "open" doesn't really make the position epistemically sound.

It's really more of a middle ground for those who don't care enough or who are too unsure to come to definite conclusions. I doubt those reasons are exhaustive, but they are among the chief reasons that ACs or OCs straddle the fence (I'm still basically OC, though I lean towards TE). Also, given the nature of the position, there are no definite conclusions about the genre and nature of Genesis so your connection of the positions of Genesis being literal or quasi-literal comes from nowhere. Neither is necessarily entailed by the position given its apathetic/open nature.

We must work hard to accommodate the general revelation rather than lean on unfounded semi-skepticism of it.

Apathetic/Open Creationism is not founded on semi-skepticism of general revelation. It is what it is because the adherents have a lack of concern or definiteness when they come to the issues of God's method in creation or the length of time it took. They believe general revelation reveals a creator and certain characteristics about that creator, but about the method and time of creation, they either don't see a need for particular concern or for clear-cut conclusions about the data.