Good luck with OP/OP. I never used OP/OP when I began with. I did some walkthrough solves with it and went to M2/R2 directly in 2014. My first official success was by using M2/R2/ I swtiched to 3-style gradually afterwards, and started focussing on UF/UFR 3-style and 5-style from the year 2018 onwards.
Yep I used to use R2 for corners from 2012-2017. It is a fun method, and can be optimized to 3-cycles DFR, and it is kinda fast but not regripless. U E R' U2 S' U2 R' S R' E' R' U'