Tactics. And ditch the engines and fancy software for now - I got to 1300 OTB rating (which is like 1500 daily rating here equivalent) with only a few basic chess books that focused on tactics.
In particular, I recommend only one book: "Back to Basics: Tactics" by Heisman. Read it again and again and again, and apply the principles, and listen to what he says in the book, and soon you'll be at least 1600. (Well, not soon, but relatively quickly - it takes a long time for chess improvement in general).
Also, chess can be like math in that you need basic principles before you can move on to advanced stuff.
If you want to get a comprehensive idea of what a game of chess is all about (like the basic building blocks of math), then read my blog post: how to understand everything in chess, which I've linked on my profile description. That might be a good start for you.
. Definitely not necessary if all you want is to move past beginner. But if you wanted something like a curriculum you get at school, this might be close.
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For those past the beginner stage if you had to learn chess all over again from scratch, whats the first thing you would do to get out of the beginner state and to the intermediate skill level?
I've got things like lucas chess and have a lot of ebooks but progress seems slow. Is there a clear cut streamlined way for me to get out of being a beginner and move to the intermediate level where the real fun begins? Chess seems like theres no clear cut way to learn it unlike say mathematics where you start with addition then move up. It seems in chess everyone has their own opinion on what to learn but is there a step by step process to learning chess? I'd like to get to that 1500-1600 intermediate level as soon as possible because being a beginner is no fun when you don't know what to do or how to think about certain boards.