Help on reading serve?

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I suggest a safe approach to these serves. If I want to push or chop it, I will wait a little more, try to add my own backspin and aim deep to their body or backhand. If I loop it, I would also wait a little more, try to create pretty high arc and aim at the middle of the table, not too short, not too deep, just as safe as possible. Give room for misreading the spin, sometimes its 30% sometimes 70%, I can’t read them precisely, I will treat all of them as 50% and make a safe return according to that.
 
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I made some progress on reading serve. I played a guy who I lost to 0-3 some weeks ago. If you recall, I felt I was just a completely better player than him, especially because he has funny/glitchy strokes, but last time I played I just lost about 70% of points on his serve. I couldnt return well last time. This time I came in mentally prepared for his serves that I said dont have "proper" spin. Instead of being fancy, I just returned his serves with neutral push or light flick. Once we got into the rally, he almost never scored a point against me, and I won 3-0 this time.

Another guy who I lost to in previous weeks I beat 3-1 as well. One major adjustment I made was to not play too fast, not attack to early, not go for power so soon. I think last time we played, I lost my points trying to attack quickly and making errors. Of course, this is not the ideal way to play, because ideally you want to be first to attack. But I find that at least for now, I open myself to errors and lose to lower level players when I try to attack too much. When I play slower, they make errors, or a better chance to attack inevitably appears.

And finally, the one guy who I had the MOST difficulty returning his serves, I think I was 0-10 total up till now. This time I lost 2-3, but was ahead 7-3 in the last game and almost won. With just a few more adjustments, I feel I should be beating him.
 
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By the way, I certainly dont think I returned their serves well. A more advanced player would have just easily smashed my weak returns. But these lower level players cant do much. I essentially just returned their junk ball with my own junk ball and won. (this is the strategy many of you recommended to knock off players with poor technique)

I still need to work on actually doing good returns. But it seems that when I attempt to do "good" returns such as banana flicks or loops, I make a ton of errors and just give away points to low level players.
 
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There is no easy solution besides practice and experience.
My first coach had very nasty serves. I told him I just wanted to get past the 4 four strokes so serves and serve returns where the first two strokes.
You need to pay careful attention to how and when the paddle meets the ball. It takes practice. Also, I have found that using my wrist a lot, or not, will add just enough variation to make the opponent make a mistake. My first coach did this to me. I practice ghost serves where the ball almost goes off the table then rolls back to the net. These kind of serves have little speed but a lot of back spin and little energy to borrow to get the ball back over the net.

When I was a noob, I would setup my robot to serve the kind of serve I had problems with the previous night. This did wonders. Eventually I learn how to counter these serves so the my returns were not easy to kill.

My first coach was an SOB when it came to his serves. He could place the ball to my right or left at angles and then go deep and fast when I started to cheat or anticipate. Eventually I could move fast enough to get to the balls until I got tired and then I was dead meat.

All I can say is get as much experience/practice as you can and stay in shape to you can move. This is harder to do when you are 68.
 
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My idea is, when your paddle touch the ball, you can really feel how spiny it is. So make a general judge of whether it is top/under spin. Then apply your force differently according to what you feel when your paddle hit the ball.
 
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