Are you trying to turn this into an intelligent design argument?

Human life is short, so instead of going through lengthy trial-and-error, like nature does, our brains evolved to make complex predictions about our environment based on past observations and simulation. That's what we call intelligence. It's not necessarily the best way to build something complex, but it is fast enough to be useful in a life time. I don't see any reason to assign additional meanings to the word like "how well a system is built" or to personify evolution into something other than a trial-and-error process.