There is no magic bullet here unless you are willing to play down material

Nice answer.

Learning an opening to improve your results / feel better about the positions you're getting is a fairy tale.  Which is what people are trying to tell you.  If you want to learn a new opening, fine, but the secret is you'll be studying it from a middlegame perspective.  Pawn structures, common themes, maneuvers from master games, this sort of thing.  As everyone else has said it's the fundamentals that will help you play a solid and more enjoyable game from start to finish.  Studying openings themselves will have you feeling lost as soon as your memorized moves run out.

I'm not trying to find some golden opening that wins me all my games. I'm trying to find an opening that I can find interesting and enjoyable through certain positional aspects that I like. I know my tactics aren't perfect. But that doesn't mean I am going to enjoy playing any opening.

I'm not trying to study openings! I'm trying to find an opening that can help provide a middle game position I like. Not all openings are the same.

And baloghs defence is risky but not unplayable. It's not the only opening that is risky. If an IM (I think he was an IM anyway) couldn't provide any solid reasoning as to what was wrong with it it is not unsound. Maybe risky, but playable.

Your reasoning makes no sense regarding Balogh's defense.

My playing style is to shuffle pieces back and forth and wait for the other guy or gal to lose.

I haven't found any opening that's suitable for this yet.

I have a suggestion for choosing openings. In the first volume of Yusupov's Build up your chess series, the only chapter on openings is gambits. The reason I can see behind this is that through playing gambits regularly you keep reminding yourself how important development is over anything else. Any opening can then be played in a sharp attacking style or slow positional style.

The best way to improve tactical awareness and understand the crucial role of development in the opening is to play true gambits. Buy Boris Alterman's three books, and you will gradually become a more dangerous player. If you then find that you don't enjoy sharp attacking play that much, you can always switch to a complete positional repertoire, which is fairly easy to do: just play the Caro-Kann, the Nimzo and the Queen's Indian like Karpov did.

That's a great game, Pfren!

I think I may have seen it before. 

Oh, so has the OP. I posted the same game in  #64 in this thread! 

Great game, Pfren. Carlsen has such a tremendous feel for the initiative in open games.