I actually heard a beautiful philosophical argument that married the idea of creationism with the fossils making it a good solution to scientists and religious believers that just weren't funny for any of them. I hate the fact I cannot remember the philosopher, I saw it in a Borges book, but the idea was the following:
The universe its a closed system and as such it repeats cycles eternally once after the other, that way we get the illusion of time and we get rid of the annoying creation start-point -until here this is no flattering philosophy, I'll cut to the juicy part. God is an external element, and as such it can affect history at any given point, making the whole cycle shapeshift in order to accept the changes given by the external force. You see, the cycle changes whole when its affected, past and present. Lets say that God's intervention in the cycle was during one jew-day -which is kind of the point of building a theory that marries creationism with evolution-, and that he intervened six times, heavily mutating the universe during each one. At the end, the universe shifted again, and for the external viewer -God- only six days of in-universe time has passed, but the entire universal cycle shifted. This way, the past of the universe seems to have existed even if it never did, we get fossils of animals that never actually lived because creation existed no long after the first human showing up on earth, the rest being just the universe settling down.
And thus this not popular yet charming theory explain a possible beginning for the universe as we know it.
Hence the impopularity of the theory. People just did not like that God would mislead people like that. At the same time, people assume that there is such thing as fair game and by judging God they expect them to act on how they would. I mean, judging God by our standards its kind of a silly thing to do.