Originally Posted by YorkeDaddy

I agree with both of you in several ways but I think this statement is what I agree with the most. For instance before I had ever heard of a "London opening" I figured out that it can be powerful to to get key pieces like a Bishop and a Knight out towards the middle of the board as soon as possible. Therefore an opening play for white like D4 is good and logical because it opens up the diagonal for your Bishop to get into the game. I didn't have to memorize this, it just made sense.

That's a very surface level example. On the other hand I think it's a lot more important to study endgames than openings. It is nowhere near as obvious or intuitive to execute a lot of the checkmates that are out there. At least for me anyway. A situation like King/Bishop/Knight is extremely difficult to find the checkmate. There are memorization helpers I've used like "to checkmate with just a King and a Rook, create a right triangle" like is mentioned in this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkmate#King_and_rook

These kinds of memorization helpers feel extremely important to not blundering endgames