[graycat]

I thought of that but regarded 'gradually' as too far, too many words away, from 'get', the word it is modifying.

[aninhumer]

It's not as good as the split infinitive, but it works okay despite the distance, because it's modifying the entire sentence.

[graycat]

When I was diagramming sentences, they never let me modify "the entire sentence"! Maybe the reason was that Latin never did that!