ThrillerFan: "As a life long French player, it has to do with White's ignorance and not that the French is all mighty."
Although I don't play at your level, that statement accords 100% with my own limited experience. I have one friend, a player of my own humble category, who plays the exchange against the french almost exclusively. And because he plays it as his main anti-french weapon, he does pretty well with it, until he runs into much stronger players. (And when that happens, well opening choice isn't usually the decisive factor) He says he plays it partly because he is comfortable with the positions he gets, but mostly because it "gets the french players out of their comfort zones" and "This way, the french player doesn't get the kind of position he wants" Which leads me ask, what kind of a position does a french player actually want, what positions does a french player feel comfortable in?
Yeah TF, you nailed it in one. They really don't get it
A lot depends on the maturity of the French player.
There are a number of pawn structures the French player has to be able to hand. 3 really in particular:
1) The blocked center - often seen in the Winawer, McCutchen, and Advance
2) The IQP center - often seen in the Tarrasch (Black gets the IQP) or Exchange with c4 (White gets the IQP)
3) The symmetrical center - mostly the Exchange Variation.
Now there are a few other structures, like the backwards pawn in the Closed Tarrasch, but I play 3...c5, not 3...Nf6 any more.
Another is the structures that result from the Rubinstein.
The one you mainly avoid is the mobile center, where White gets mobile pawns and Black has to attack the extended center from the outside with pieces, which you mainly see in the Grunfeld and Alekhine (hmmmm....and ThrillerFan HATES the Grunfeld and Alekhine)
The exchange doesn't bother me one bit. To me, it's a free half point and often I will get the full point!
In fact I could have written exactly the same thread.
If you play the exchange, play it for a reason!
I used to only face the advance variation, but at my level now it seems that maybe 75% of my opponents, or even more, play 2.Nf3, 3.exd5 and 4.d4.
Happily I heard about the Bd6 Nc6 Nge7 Bg4 set-up that usually aims to castle on the queen's side, and that allows me to create an unbalanced position without pawn structure weaknesses (weaknesses that could be created by playing c7-c5 in order to have an IQP).