Recently I've been looking at one of the courses dealing with the many Sicilian variations. In this particular course, ratings points were not necessarily deducted for choosing a different move than the writer of the course desired. A message would be displayed saying something along the lines of, 'that move is sound, but here we are looking for something more along these lines' and a short explanation would follow. It sounds from your ideas like this has not been your experience, however. (maybe some courses are better at this than others...)
Get rid of the ratings for opening courses
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Just an idea: consider taking the rating +/- out of Mentor tutorials for units dealing with the opening. It's unneccessarily disheartening to consistently lose points for making sound opening moves (that just aren't the ones the trainer has in mind). Without better guidance in the tutorial as to the purpose of the particular move, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Otherwise, the tutorials look useful to me. I guess I could consider just not caring about the rating at all, but there's a demotivation factor there that, I think, doesn't need to be.