Baburin is a Russian-born Grandmaster who came to Ireland around 1993. You might think the popularity of this book would have led to a generation of Irish players who specialized in IQP positions. But instead the opposite seemed to happen: it bred a generation who assumed their opponents had read the book, felt they hadn't mastered it themselves, and avoided those positions with both Black and White.
A contributing factor was that this book was more difficult for young intermediate players to grasp than an openings manual, where you can improve your results just by memorising a few extra lines. Perhaps also that there just wasn't the same culture of chess and chess education that other European countries had: Irish players just weren't used to being taught how to play the middlegame.
IQP is, if you ask me, bread and butter of chess and should be introduced to begineers way earlier than it tends to be. Plans for both sides are clear and thematic (consequently less memorization in opening is needed), it's imbalanced and based on piece play (consequently tactics and calculation) more than on abstract considerations.
That's just not true.
As you progress learning resources sadly get more and more expensive indeed. Not to mention the cost of tournaments (travel and accomodation expenses add up very quickly).
I'm at 1200 in lichess, tried for example multiple ,,beginner friendly'' openings, like London / Kings Indian defense, but I realized that as four knights opening is the most natural for me, I should focus on the Italian, which is the closest to my natural style of play.
Also there are tactics practice, books, videos, but I get discourage when I see how fast some people are advancing (especially as I'm in my 40s).
You're at the level where you're probably not hanging all your pieces or hanging mate-in-one too commonly. So learn endgames. You can win/draw like 75% of the time from even being down a piece or two at your level if you can play the endgame quickly and accurately.
Then, refine the middlegame, learning how to get the advantage. Doing puzzles for dozens of hours will teach you how to recognize a lot of basic tactics that can win early.
But only once you've scraped the barrel with the middlegame would I start focusing strongly on openings.
Yes, I'm through the trivial things that's why I feel that I've got stuck.
Probably I spent too much time playing and not enough practicing.
What you write makes a lot of sense, I know the very basics of end game play, but not on my level for example, and just playing against people doesn't give me the consistency I need to get better faster.
The same with tactics, I can spend many hours playing with other people and I'm getting better with tactics, but again it's not enough to get consistent with pattern recognition.
Learning it is tougher of course!
Are there things that you wish poor children had less of, with more stressors from poverty?
If you learn not to take a pawn because 5 moves later you'll lose a bishop, maybe you won't take on credit card debt when 5 months later you owe 10% more in interest.