Researching an underlying and forming an opinion, implementing one of the infinite strategies to capitalize on it can be learned from books or from others. For instance, early in Charles Cottle's book, he shows 10 different ways to create the exact same risk/profit profile for a long 45/50/55 butterfly. These implementation strategies reflect the personality of individual traders as much as personal preferences related to time, risk, ratio, liquidity, etc. To me, the day to day risk management of positions is what makes very successful traders different from average to losing traders and for that you need to go deeper and learn as much as you can... the greeks, portfolio managemnt, and the inherent relationships between financial instruments. You don't need to know all of this to be successful but why leave that on the table when you're talking about your own money. For instance I had a home run month in July that significantly crushed my personal expectations, however, I'm more proud of how I traded in June. July's success was mostly due to a bullish earnings month and the leverage power of options but in June, I managed out of post-Brexit disaster positions by adding delta neutral hedges using country ETF, commodity, bond, and currency options I never used before, turning June into a decent profit even if the end of month saving reversion had not occurred. Good luck. I love trading options. It's more flexible, scalable and dynamic than trading stocks. You can wait years for a 100% return on a stock, if you're lucky, but I had couple triple digit returns at the open just this week.
Commissions, slippage and short-term capital gains taxes usually means that all the effort to sell puts leads you to the same return, give or take 1-2% as sitting on your ass long the index and not doing shit. It is a fine tool to use in certain situations but I would never construct a strategy or portfolio to do short puts 100% of the time all the time. You are just making your broker rich while the others laugh.
I am not sure if there is an edge based on my limited backtest and trades. But many studies indicated there is an edge over the index. If so one can always buy PUT (an index that track selling a sequence of 1-month ATM put), sit back and collect the profit.
I cant imagine there is always an edge, you are just selling short puts. If market rallies you will always underperform. If market crashes hard you will still lose a ton of money so losing slightly less than the market is not an edge. Selling puts when you see a fat premium and a support level or rangebound situation is not a bad approach but a constant selling put approach is just spinning your wheels. Imagine if a buy and hold person will mostly do about the same while you work hard monthly selling puts? Too much effort for too little extra return.