This response makes me think you glanced at the article but did not read it. I assure you it is highly relevant to your claim that distinct families appear without plausibly evolving.
It is true that selection pressure can be quite strong on domesticated species. It can also on occasion be very strong in nature, too. But the mutation rate is no higher for domestic species than wild ones, so yes there is limited variation. And before you try, upping the mutation rate won’t help you because then you still need generations of letting natural selection filter all those mutations to find a few good ones, and if you’re imposing severe artificial selection for random traits at the same time, you’re interfering and making it all take even longer. Evolution takes a lot of time and trial, and you just can’t get around that in a thousand years or so.
What makes you think we don’t? You think scientists don’t argue if a given division should be at a genus level vs. a family level, or a family vs. subfamily? What does that mean if not that a new family is on the verge of becoming?
Your “butterfly to blue whale” example is quite odd, because both of these organisms are the result of a lot of evolution going in different directions. Why do you assume that the butterfly is more primitive than the whale? Just because it’s smaller? A butterfly has a highly developed exoskeleton while a whale has a somewhat less evolved ossified internal skeleton. It would be much more likely for a predecessor which lacked any kind of skeleton to develop into different lines of descent with different structural solutions.
That’s not to say that, given enough time and suitable environmental pressures, butterflies couldn’t evolve into giant air-breathing sea creatures. But they wouldn’t be blue whales, and why should they be? Whales are mammals and butterflies are insects, and that won’t change any more than whales will stop being vertebrates or chihuahuas will stop being dogs. They could evolve in the far future into something totally unrecognizable to us today—but they’ll still be part of Canidae!