fwiw, I'm with you. Excuse the gratuitous war analogy, but I suspect the approach of OP is akin to talking about which first 8 steps to take (north-east, SW, S) when going into battle -- it's such a small scope of the whole event that it's pointless, and talking about those first steps makes one seem naive to the actual holistic task
If the OP spent a month learning Go, I am sure that it would make sense to him as well. Work through a series like https://senseis.xmp.net/?LearnToPlayGoSeries while playing Go regularly against a variety of opponents. Before book 3 it should be obvious.
I don't mean to offend you, but it seems you've been doing something wrong -- in my opinion, in more than a month you could've advanced much further than 15k.
If you like, I could have a look at several your lost games and maybe suggest how to improve. Just a 3k at kgs, but still.
For the near term future, LeelaZero is the best public engine at computer Go.
This means if you enter a hypothetical "Cyborg" Go competition (computer-assistance allowed), the majority of newbies will simply be playing LeelaZero #1 plays over and over again.
You don't need to build an exhaustive opening book covering all possible moves. You only need to pick say, the top 5 moves LeelaZero ever considers. If you spend ~16-bytes per position and store 1-trillion positions on a 16TB Hard Drive, you'll be able to exhaustively map the top5 moves LeelaZero considers into 17-ply.
From there, you pick the positions that LeelaZero thinks its winning in, but in actuality is losing. You have a map towards 1-trillion positions to choose from, and your opponent (if they only pick from the top5 best moves LeelaZero ever outputs) will walk into your trap.
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As long as your opponent picks the top 5-moves from LeelaZero, you'll have the map towards victory. I think you're severely underestimating the abilities of a simple, dumb, opening database.
