Speaking of which, how does one understand the direction of play (not opening, mid game that kind) ?

Your questions are too general, everybody has a problem with the middlegame, hard to say anything without concrete examples. Maybe you need to work on tesuji? This is an advice I often hear from Bill.

I'm trying to embrace a more open minded approach to the game as I was too stubborn to give up my own group of stones often in games. I find that sometimes it is better to let go than hold on and use the aji to one's own advantage.

Here's some weekly updates on my progresses:-

1. I've been practicing sometime across the week with OGS's Spectral 4k bot.
2. I occasionally won some games but generally I got punished by the bot.
3. I find that I gave my opponent influence too easily. Even though I get the territory I wanted, due to the massive influences I don't get to fight or reduce them at all. It looks like I need to buckle up and learn how to balance influence and territory.
4. I've been doing tesuji drills and life & death on daily basis.
5. My "Shape Up!" reads doesn't help me too often, I don't come across many situations where I can put them to use. But I keep reading it since I committed and tried to create a collection of shapes that I will encounter most often to refer. Hope it helps.
6. The book that helped me the most was Elementary Series: Attack and Defense. I took a peep at "All About Influence" to fix my worry and anxiety to handle thickness / influence. I may include that book into my study in future.

Conclusion:-
I'm trusting the daily drill of tesuji to help my games, and I wish I calculate more often in games. The time pressure puts me to play on "feeling" too often and I think that will develop really bad habits, I'm trying to shake this off. I'm also learning more on practical theories that I will encounter more often so I can put them to use. Concluding this week's performance, I'm still at the same rank at OGS 10K and no changes despite all the wins and losses. I hope I'm able to see my OGS rank progresses in coming weeks. I've also started an IGS account at 10k and have not played any game yet as OGS is my main server now. I'll continue this weekly reflection post on Sundays for coming weeks.

Weaknesses encountered:-
1. Influence handling
2. Direction of play
3. Josekis (Not corner josekis, they are josekis of reduction, invasion etc.)
4. Lacking fighting spirit (Wanted to settle down too often and choose sub-par moves and put less pressure to opponent, not confident to handle cuts)

I've also posted my sgf for reviews at "Game Analysis" session. AI reviews don't help because I don't understand the "whys". Please point out what I can do better to improve

Studying techniques, L&D, concepts, openings ... is definitely going to improve your game but only in the long run. If you are sensitive to short term (rank) progress, you'll have to consciously integrate aspects of Go which matter most to the outcome. At this level, these are often aspects of gamesmanship (not giving up, managing time, think of alternative moves) and very mundane things like keeping track of liberties of a group (to avoid stupid losses).

Basic techniques will get you a long way. See https://senseis.xmp.net/?BasicInstinct

I've wondered what the qualitative difference might be between solving 'easy' tsumego (tsumego aimed at a few ranks below yourself) and 'hard' tsumego (tsumego aimed at a few ranks above yourself). My impression is that instinctual training from easy tsumego is long-term improvement plan while gamesmanship is more so about mental fortitude and perhaps overriding bad instincts most kyu players may have?

How much time you want to work on a problem is up to you. My feeling for kyu players is anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. But the problems should be hard enough that you get only around half of the right in that time. OC, you should review those you miss and overlearn them. And it doesn't hurt to review easy problems from time to time. Like one afternoon a year. Solving easy problems is a long term plan for non-improvement. You have to challenge yourself.

On the subject of easy tsumego, I've concidentally just started translating a short video by Japanese pro Yanagisawa Satoshi 5p (柳澤理志) on exactly this subject. It's part of a 4 part series of videos, 5 to 10 mins each, focused on how to use tsumego to improve. I intend to translate all of them and will share them on the forum if there's interest, but for now you may want to know that the first (and longest) video is about why you should focus on easy tsumego.

The reasoning is that more complicated tsumego are built on top of the simpler ones. This is an entirely literal statement. The positions found at the beginning of beginner tsumego can also be found 1 or 2 moves in to the solutions of a more advanced ones, and those advanced problems will again be found 1 or 2 moves in to the solutions of yet more advanced tsumego. It is by building this foundation step by step that one learns to solve more advanced problems.

He also stresses that it's important to repeat problems and always read out the answer thoroughly. This applies even when you remember the answer from last time you solved it.

So my opinion is that although SoDesuNe's experience of improving more from hard problems because they forced him to read is likely very common, the important difference was not the problems themselves, but actually that he was reading in one instance and not the other. In other words I think people are focusing on the wrong variable.