What openings provide "mini-objectives" in the early game? As a beginner I've found that it is psychologically really nice playing QGA as white simply because I have a clear task at hand in the early game - namely recapture that pawn.  Similarly, hedgehog for black is satisfying because you are aiming for a layout rather than a sequence.

I often find it quite hard to stumble through the early game when there is no clear objective - many openings the objective is simply to "develop pieces onto good squares".  I'm not yet good enough to visualise that task so play pretty aimlessly.

What other openings should I look at that have clear, understandable, short term objectives to get you to the mid-game?
I think this question divides into two parts:


Openings with "mini objectives" early in the game.
Openings that go for a layout instead of a sequence.


The second part is easier to tackle: There are a lot of openings, usually called "systems", that go for a certain structure without bothering too much with what the opponent is doing. Some examples:


The London System
The Colle-Zukertort
The Stonewall-Dutch
The Stonewall with white


Also in many sicilian lines (most notably the dragon) white just castles long and starts to march his kingside pawns --> sac,sac,mate as Bobby Fischer famously said. But these are much more dependent on move order issues and concrete tactics.
You could interpret "long castles" as a mini-objective for white in the English attack, which is almost always achieved by playing f3, Be3, Qd2.

Mini-objective vary from variation to variation, but I think there is one mini-objective that is almost always relevant, especially when playing black: pawn levers. 

For example if you play the black side of a QGA, you might go for the pawn lever c5. In a King's Indian black prepares the pawn lever f5, and sometimes c6 (whereas white goes for c5). In a Benoni he goes for b5 and sometimes f5. In a Meran you will always play c5 or e5 at some point, while white usually plays e4, in a Italian or Spanish game white prepares e4, in a French black goes c5 and white hopes for f5 … they are all over the place!

So my advice would be to look out for pawn levers in the openings you play. They should very often provide the mini-objective that gets you from the opening into the middlegame.