@SnackYourPawn thank you a lot for your thoughts!
First of all I want to clarify few things!
This study is in progress, I just started working on it and there is a lot of things, lines, moves, ideas, missing, of course! I never really studied any Opening Theory, neither did I play any of them in an OTB game. I am missing lots of experience in almost all the lines, because I never played them! So I don't have a good feeling for the positions! Nevertheless I have a rather good intuition and there is lots of written theory out there that helps me creating this study! On top of that I am working alone on it, so everything takes some time xD
About this Kind of "interactive study":
You can only show one line/chapter. It is NOT possible to deviate and show few lines in one chapter!
Last but not least, I already talked about it in the introduction of the Study, but here I will share some thoughts as well, what I think about Opening Theory in general:
In my opinion, I can't rely on any computer evaluation, any written book, that it will assess any given position right, unless I have a proof. This proof can be a forced checkmate, a heavy material advantage (that is objectively winning), a positional proof and probably something like a +3 computer evaluation as well *
*(+5 maybe, I don't know what is the minimum evaluation I can trust it is a winning Position. You would find that number by letting a Computer evaluate all brute forced drawn positions (which is not possible since we don't know all forced drawn positions out there) that are possible in chess. The highest evaluation the computer gives, for example +2.25 is the highest evaluation for all random forced drawn position for example in 150 moves. Then you would know you CAN trust all + 2.26 evaluations winning for sure!)
What I am saying, in my eyes Opening Theory is like a great kind of book, all chessplayers wrote down their experience in it! It helps us a lot, nobody can be sure if the experience is objectively correct, though.
Let's assume all Opening Main Lines at least 15 moves long (even the ones most Grandmaster think is completely losing) can be drawn by force if black plays correct! This would mean a Computer would give all the lines 0.0!
Nevertheless our experience (and the resulting winrate statistics for both colors) would show us which positions are easier to handle for humans than other!
This means for humans it would make much more sense to have evaluations that represent how well resulting positions out of Opening Lines are handled correctly by humans. +1 could mean 10 out of 100 Player would win the position with White and 0 out of 100 would win it with Black, since it is a way easier position for White from a human point of view. Still the engine knows 0.0 is correct, just doesn't help any human though.
I would even go so far to say every chessplayer would need his own individual evaluation next to the Opening Lines. Every Player has positions he is more familiar with and plays much better than completely new positions he has never seen before.
I know this was much text there, but the conclusion for my Opening Study is:
I want to create a tool which allows players like me, that basically don't know anything about Openings, to get a fast overview on the Main Lines, that chess masters evaluated as playable for both sides, out there. If we had one Opening with 2 fully equally good Main Lines a and b and 50 years ago all GM was playing Main line a and nowadays all GM are playing Main Line b it doesn't make any sense for me to just mention Main Line b, because it is popular now, when I personally have way more experience with type of positions as in Main line a. For me it would even higher my winning chances to ignore the line played by all GM nowadays completely!
That is why I decided to find the classical, old Main Lines of each Opening to get an overview. I want everybody who uses this study to just get a feeling what kind of Openings, Positions are out there, so he or she can try many different lines in a short time and pick a few that suits him or her. Then one can study those lines in more detail and decide if you agree with the modern approach everybody is playing right now, or if you personally have better results with other lines!
For example you are telling me all the second White moves in the French Defense I was giving, are not so relevant right now and I agree, almost everybody plays 2.d4. Still you get playable positions out of the other moves and nobody knows if they might not be even better! You will find very often in many lines, even the least popular ones, at least one Magnus Carlsen game!
You won't find good Openings suiting your style by just playing moves everybody plays, but by trying out new fresh ideas as well. That is the reason, why you felt most variations are not up to date! I wanted to pick the more classical, old lines first!
Still I want to thank you for your notes, you are right, there is often 3 or 4 popular main lines in the NI for example. I have the idea to create new studys for each Opening i covered, link it in the current study and discuss it in more detail with all Main Lines and not just one Main Line as it is done in the current Study. Though this will take a lot of time as well to create and is kind of a huge project ;)
