[rectang]

The dominance of formulaic application of opening theory over improvisation is a problem at all levels of chess. Bobby Fischer crafted chess960, a variant on shuffle chess, to deal with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960#History

> Fischer's goal was to eliminate what he considered the complete dominance of openings preparation in classical chess, replacing it with creativity and talent. His belief about Russians fixing international games also provided motivation. In a situation where the starting position was random it would be impossible to fix every move of the game. Since the "opening book" for 960 possible opening systems would be too difficult to devote to memory, the players must create every move originally. From the first move, both players must devise original strategies and cannot use well-established patterns. Fischer believed that eliminating memorized book moves would level the playing field.

[mlthoughts2018]

I think this is not really true at all. Yasser Seirawan has written and lectured extensively about playing variations of the English & 1. Nf3 openings as white, and King’s Indian Defense and various Pirc / French / Caro-Kann lines that allow either player to pretty much veer out of theory-heavy variations and reach early positions in which there are no sharp tactical edges to the game and your opponent could not generally have forced any without entering a dramatically losing position.