Studying openings vs study tactics
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Well you have to play the opening well enough to reach a playable middlegame.
WTF does the OP delete his initial comment?
"Every now and then someone advances the idea that one may gain success in chess by using shortcuts. 'Chess is 99% tactics' - proclaims one expert, suggesting that strategic understanding is overrated; 'Improvement in chess is all about opening knowledge' - declares another. A third self-appointed authority asserts that a thorough knowledge of endings is the key to becoming a master; while his expert-friend is puzzled by the mere thought that a player can achieve anything at all without championing pawn structures.
To me, such statements seem futile. You can't hope to gain mastery of any subject by specializing in only parts of it. A complete player must master a complete game ..." - FM Amatzia Avni (2008)
Up to master levels, tactics and strategy certainly are superior to opening knowledge and allows you to evolve much more.
If you focus more on openings as a beginner your chess strenght won't go much further than lets say 1600-1700, i've seen lots of players that can play efficiently on book moves, but once you get out of book moves you can see they're pretty much lost/don't really know what to do but trade pieces and hope for the best.
What happens to many of these players is that they'll limit their own chess repertoire and vision by being too restricted to chess openings, and eventually reach a plateau of their chess opening knowledge but can't really push further unless they dedicate themselves to study middle game knowledge, and i've seen countless players that fit into these categories.
On the other hand, if you have middle game knowledge and endgame, it's much easier to "know" where you need to move your pieces in any opening and how to force weaknesses and exploit them.
Sure there's peculiar traps in each opening that everyone must learn to avoid, but when you reach a certain mid/endgame strenght, you can analyse positionally almost everything and understand the motives behind the moves in a deeper way than following through opening study.
So for most people, i would say for them to stick with a certain number of favorite openings that they like best, and then try to study a lot of tactics and middle game strategy to get real strenght in chess, knowing what to do with almost any position goes a long way, instead of having a sharp knowledge of how to work in book moves but get clueless once some opponent gets outside of them. As a beginner all you need to know to master openings is knowing the principles and traps there is to it, and it's only at masters levels that opening knowledge might get to be more important since most of other skills are the same at those levels.