Should e4 be less focused on for beginner and intermediate players?

I agree.

I’ve been playing both e4 and d4 since the 1970s. I recommend playing 1.e4 at least one hundred times and meeting it with 1…e5 at least one hundred times before trying 1.d4.

Playing something like the London without vast experience with 1.d4, as well as with the tactical sense you acquire playing the King’s Gambit, Italian, Scotch, and Spanish, will guarantee you get a nice position that you do not understand.

We're talking about beginners and the best way to teach is by an emphasis on piece development. 1. d4 openings are therefore more suited because they have a stronger emphasis on piece development, with tactics tending to come when development is completed. Therefore 1.d4 should come first. Maybe you'd get better results in your coaching but it's very difficult to change.

Agreed. I switched to d4 wayyyy too early in my career and ended up having to learn e4 later and having a lot of trouble with it.

if you can’t play the symmetrical Italian, well…

I asked Irina Krush, who always played 1.d4 from the beginning of her chess career, if she could switch to 1.e4. She said that she would have too much to learn. She does play 1.e4 in simuls, but not in her own tournament games.

Bobby Fischer only played 1.e4 until the World Championship match.

I have long espoused Max Euwe’s contention (The Development of Chess Style) that an individual’s personal growth in chess benefits from following the patterns of chess history.* On the other hand, Willy Hendrik’s critique of this notion in On the Origin of Good Moves is worth pondering.

*Richard Reti, Masters of the Chess Board also pushes this idea.

<<<Willy Hendrik’s critique of this notion in On the Origin of Good Moves is worth pondering.>>>
Or my critique. 1. e4 first is the wrong way round, because too many 1. e4 openings leave pawns apparently unprotected. The so-called beginner has to know too much and so it slows the learning process down.

One can think of it two ways. Sometimes one tend to over defend pawns to. Sometimes just letting go of a pawn to get more play might be better. In some gambits lines yes but also in other times. Like you can create threats etc while your opponents is wasting time to go after a pawn. Or open up file. Like sacrificing b pawn as white when playing versus Scandinavian where black takes it with queen and white gets good compensation for the pawn. I have seen Mark Esserman get some cool play sacrificing the b pawn. Which gave him time to lift the rook on the queen side and swing it over to the king side and opponents soon after gets mated.

These days I shy away from 1.e4, because to play it well, one needs to have a rather extensive repertoire.

Given that I have a somewhat busy life, I find 1.e4 a bit difficult to manage.

Though, when I first started learning chess (20 years ago), 1.e4 was the only move I considered. I wasn't even really aware that there were other moves.

And at the chess club that I soon joined, all the players were 1.e4 players. There was never any first move other than 1.e4.

I didn't discover other opening moves until a few years later, when I picked up a game collection and saw a Queen's Gambit game for the first time. It confused me, and I didn't like the look of it.

These days, my tastes have changed. I find Queen's Gambit games fascinating, and 1.e4 games a bit of a mixed bag (sometimes too boring, sometimes too challenging).

But I do believe that my 1.e4 time taught me some valuable chess lessons, even if I don't play it much anymore.

Granted, as black, I love facing 1.e4. I find the games dynamic and interesting. So I hope 1.e4 players never disappear. They help keep chess exciting.

"apparently": precisely what beginning players need to learn.

How many ways does Black think they can safely take e4 in the Berlin Defense? Learning these ideas with 1.e4 will accelerate your understanding of the Queen's Gambit.

I would think 1. e4 is fine for beginners, 1. d4 should be ok, but i would recommend 1. e4. 

This is precisely the mentality that has some lesser coaches teaching their beginners the London System.  It is fairly easy to teach, has very few move order issues, and you get into a middlegame in a roughly equal position.  The problem doesn't show up until they get to 1800-2000 and wonder why they are stuck, only to be told they need to go back and learn more middlegame structures (that they do not see in such system openings) in order to progress further.

Trading long term growth for short term results is not an effective strategy.  It is a bit like a credit card:  sure you got that item on sale for $100, but you will be paying on it for the next 10 years and end up paying $1000 in total.

Just read in Simple Chess Michael Stean's analysis of Karpov -- Westerinen, Nice 1974 and was reminded of the excellent explanation of basic opening principles in the Ruy Lopez in Chess Openings: Theory and Practice, my bible in the 1970s. Karpov's games, of course, are far more sophisticated than anything in Horowitz's classic.

I like beginners starting with e4 because the moves that follow make the clearest sense.  Get the pieces out and castle, avoid a few basic mates, then plan the attack.   e4, nf3, bc4, o-o, c3, d4  very straightforward and the action starts right away.  Also, all those great classic games by Morphy and Andersson all started with e4 and they can enjoy the legacy of the game.

With d4 the obvious reply is d5, then comes the explanation of c4, and right away the main line is a positional gambit that's not really a gambit.  I've often found it an awkward way to start a beginner on the road to playing.

After a few games with e4, show them d4 and they can decide what suits their temperament. 

I don't play the London. The London is incredibly complex and difficult for white, because it must deal with any of black's move orders. It's a transpositional opening and what you are saying there is completely wrong. I also used not to understand the London.

A good coach wouldn't start with the London. I think with the queen's gambit. Through the queen's gambit you can easily teach ALL of the principles of chess. I've heard it said, by GMs, that the Spanish is the queen's gambit of the kingside openings. It's too complex to begin with, whereas if you start by teaching the Italian, you're immediately teaching your pupils bad habits.

Within 1.e4 and 1.d4 there are good and bad openings for beginners, both have their fair share of simple systems like the Scotch opening/gambit and Vienna opening/gambit for 1.e4 and exchange Queen's gambit and London system for 1.d4, which are suitable for beginners. Both also include strategically/tactically complex systems, such as Ruy Lopez and Italian game for 1.e4 and Bg5 queen's gambit and Catalan for 1.d4, which are unsuitable for beginners. 

The problem with teaching starting with the Italian is that there's a dichotomy between white playing safe and white playing in a normally attacking style. The attacking games are obviously far too difficult to use for beginners to learn from, whereas when white plays safe, you're teaching bad habits. The queen's gambit is the way to teach chess, because you can show strategies to respond to the qga and, one by one, all the various defences black uses in the qgd and how they can be responded to by white. And what a bad bishop is and how to activate it.

The queen's gambit is reasonable, if you choose the right system, e.g. exchange is fine for beginners. The Italian is generally more appropriate for titled players as it is more about slow manoeuvring and playing positionally, which is too subtle to be appreciated by most beginners (myself included).

You can assert it is "completely wrong", but it isn't.  There are very few move order issues, and very few pawn structures to understand.  That is why it is an example of a bad opening to teach beginners.  They are basically going to get similar structures over and over, but will need to start from scratch to learn the rest of the game.  Not to mention the fact that they often develop the habit of playing the opening on auto-pilot.

The Queen's Gambit is a strategically rich opening with very little in terms of tactical fighting in the opening phases.  So, you think teaching the Ruy Lopez first is too complex, but the Queen's Gambit is simple enough?  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the QG, but saying that the Ruy is too complex while promoting the QG as your alternative is a bit like saying "A Mustang is too fast for a 16-year-old new driver, lets start them off with a Camaro instead".

The irony about you insulting the Italian Game as "immediately teaching bad habits" is that it literally starts by putting 3 of your 4 minor pieces on the ideal squares for a classical development structure.

Which allows you to teach your students 1) what the classical development plan is, 2) why you must deviate from it due to tactics, and 3) how to set up and avoid common tactical motifs in the opening.  It is also one of the opening that has one of the better gambits available (the Evan's gambit) to it - which allows you to teach students how to play with the initiative instead of just material.  I suppose those are all "bad habits".

Nothing you just wrote is convincing. Yes, they learn bad habits and the result is that so many beginners develop a completely unimaginitive style of chess, which they often never move beyond because what's first taught sticks. So they never develop as players, due to teaching systems that are the result of historical mistakes in understanding how people learn and develop, made by GMs from the past who can't relate to the normal person nowadays.