[IIAOPSW]

^This, but its a good thing. Something that irks me about Chess is that at the high level the conventional wisdom is to memorize openings and gambits rather than derive moves from some sort of first principals. IMO this undermines the entire point of a strategy game.

[ummonk]

On the other hand the best player in the world is known to be a player who puts less effort into opening prep and takes his opponents out of book very frequently.

[atdt]

Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess960) is meant to address exactly that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

It has a large online following.

[esrauch]

It doesn't seem to be that large of an online following: it's supported on the main chess sites but not as one of the top default modes.