I think if you're adult class player that's busy with kids, work, etc...then just play what you like and continue to study tactics, middlegames, endgames when you can, and just enjoy yourself while trying to make progress that way. 

If you really want to improve and build yourself a solid foundation, it's definitely worth reverting to 1. e4 and 1...e5, and just suffering through some tactical beatdowns. It will definitely teach you about facets of the game that  you probably have not been experiencing in Taimanovs, etc...

'directed study' is proving useful in my case. My arguement, not 
directly stated in my post, is this:

• 10,000 hours of directed study is not a practical plan for improving my play

Fyi, there are a lot of books on tactics...In the model of self study, 
which i'd been following for a few years, I read a number of books on 
tactics. With directed study, I was given 2 books of the highest 
quality (for continued self study) and worked through tactical 
problems WITH AN INSTRUCTOR." 

"10,000 hours of directed study," is 100x more than Lasker's 
"100 hours of lessons from me would turn any normal person into a 
chess master."

Granted, master level would not make you the 'greatest performer' 
[in the world], though for the practical player reading a thread 
titled "Openings for adult class players" it could mean being the 
greatest performer at your club. Certainly would mean winning a 
lot more games. 

My 100 hours of gm lessons

• so far I've had 21.4 hours of lessons from a well regarded gm instructor/author.
• All lessons were within a 6 month period
• I have never taken chess lessons before
• my rating has improved 350 points, from 1450 to 1800

  

I noticed my playing strength improving immediately after the first 
lesson. 

Before the first lesson I emailed the gm 4 of my recent games. At the 
start of the first lesson he said, "I looked very closely at each of your 
games, spending about 15 minutes (just 15 minutes!!) on each one. 
The weakest part of your game is pretty obvious and I'm sure you 
know what it is. Right?"

"I have no idea." I said. 

"Tactics." he said. This shocked me, I thought tactics were the 
strongest part of my game!?

He sent me two books to read, both of which i had never heard of. 

In his autobiography Einstein says something like, "I would have 
preferred to pursue a study of mathmatics as it seemed to be the 
most fundamental discipline to understanding the universe but there 
are so many branches of math, each one taking a lifetime to 
understand fully and, only then does one find out if it is a worthwhile 
pursuit, that it did not seem practical. So I chose theoretical physics."

It seems similar with amateurs, chess books and self instruction. 

The amateur does not know which books, exercises and concepts are 
needed to improve their play. A strong chess instructor can easily 
spot a player's 'obvious' weakness and proscribe an efficient 
way to strengthen it. 

In other words, 10,000 hours of undirected study could be more fruitless than 100 hours of directed study. I can't fathom the result of 10,000 hours of directed study."

WOW.     I come back from vacation and notice that this thread has really taken a life of its own. I want to thank everyone for your comments and input. However, I must say the thread seems to have gone completely off-topic. 

Don't know much about hardware, but to return to human talent vs practice, I did a literature search after my last post. Google Scholar can be quite addictive when your university library gives access to all those articles!

K. Anders Ericsson and his collegues published an article doubting the existence of giftedness and innate talent ("beyond height and body size" as they say) in the journal High Ability Studies, Volume 18, Issue 1, 2007. The entire 115-page issue is devoted to this article and critical responses to it.

Referring to Mozart and other musical prodigies, they write: 

"Even biographies of very eminent individuals reveal that these individuals engaged in immense amounts of practice and their technique developed over time. In a review of musical prodigies, Lehmann (1997) noted that all had a live-in teacher, which would ensure that each of them had access to specialized instruction and encouragement to engage in the amount of practice required to maintain superior levels of performance." (p. 31). 

As an aside it's well-known that Mozart's brilliant composed music didn't spring entirely from his own imagination; all the elements are there in the music of his mentors and main influences Leopold Mozart, Myslivecek (and via him the Italian baroque), Johann Christian Bach, and Haydn. 

In fact the violinist Sarah Chang is mentioned by one of the critics as a better example of a gifted prodigy than Mozart. Ericsson et al. can only respond by lamenting that her rapid progress as a child was not carefully documented. And sticking stubbornly to the old "10-year rule" of practice needed for international standard: "Notably, Sarah continued to improve, but was only awarded a prize for adult music performance when she was 16 years old, well over a decade after her start of training with the violin." (p. 107). 
The debate continues!

Regarding chess skill, practice and talent, http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2008/pdfs/p823.pdf is a neat one-page summary by Gobet on recent findings.

I found Grabner, Stern and Neubauer (2007) interesting. In a study of players rated between 1300 and 2400 they found that all players above 2000 had verbal and numerical IQ scores of at least 85-90, while players above 2200 had at least 110-115. But this looks to be the highest threshold; the highest-rated players did not have systematically higher IQs than mere masters. 

So to become a titled player you'd better have a verbal and numerical IQ above 115, but once you do, practice and motivation are all that matters. The reason "verbal and numerical" is specified, is that the third subscale "figural" (visual) IQ was surprisingly not related to rating at all!

In a multiple regression analysis, Chess-related performance motivation, age entering a chess club and number of tournament games were the three strongest factors predicting playing strength. So practice and motivation rule, but it's good to get an early start. Only one personality trait was significantly related to playing strength: Emotion expression control, that is, the ability to maintan a poker face.

I'm tempted to criticize the authors for not including anyone higher than 2387 (not a very gifted level), but seeing that they decided to do their study in Austria, I have some sympathy with their predicament.

There are also interesting studies by Bilalic et al. from 2007 on intelligence and personality in chess-playing children, but I think I'll stop now!

Smyslov_Fan wrote on 10/19/09 at 23:23:17:

No not really. The advances made in biomechanics are also outpacing that of cars, yet I dont think Bolt will ever outrun Schumi in a Fiat.

There are indeed quite some developments with regards to algorithms, which could be considered revolutionary, yet when there were un-revulotionary developments in chips it had a much bigger impact on solution times. 
To give a historical example: You could optimise all you want to the algorithms used by Nasa with the Apollo program, they wouldnt get much better. However when you run the stuff on your own PC....

Uruk wrote on 10/19/09 at 21:54:19:

Going completely OT now:
I dont disagree with any of that, yet it pales in comparison with the strides made in the hardware. It is not just the amount of bits and bytes, it is the way they are handled, how the machinery works etc. Chips have made huge progress for example. Eg DB could analyse 200 million positions per second, but that merely meant it "saw" those positions and gave a direct evaluation, a laptop could do exactly the same if it could run DB.
And you can say what you want, but all the methods you name would have been utterly useless 40 years ago and prolly 10 years ago as well (I am being optimistic  suspect 5 years ago is closer to the mark) as the hardware couldnt have dealt with it or very slow. You can also see a reverse trend in that programmers tend to program far less efficient nowadays as the speed loss is compensated by better hardware, as illustrated by the numerous internet applications.

The discussion over intellectual pursuits and whether "talent" exists, or not, is interesting.

As far as athletic competitions, "talent" exists in the form of muscle fiber disposition, CNS innervation of motor units, and biomechanical advantages. 

I'm not sure there's any indicators nearly as reliable with the intellectual pursuits.