Well i spent my full playing session only returning serves today. I hope this leads to tangible benefits soon.
Soon....it depends on your definition. But this takes work. And if you are returning the serves of one player who is about your level and he only has a few serves, which you seem to indirectly indicate below, then, you could get good at returning those serves without necessarily learning how to adjust to serves that another player is making.
As I said, I spent about 2 hours just receiving serve nonstop. But I have 2 questions that arose. My partner is righthanded serving to me.
1) He often served a short, wide angled serve cross court to my left with minimal spin. My instinct was to flick this ball. I started stepping forward with my right leg, as others suggested. But to do this, my right leg had to cross over my left leg because the ball was far wide. After a while, this footwork just didn't seem right to me. I started stepping to the left with my left foot to do the flick, and I had much more success with this. Do you think I made the correct adjustment?
2) His serve has no underspin, but it is very short and very low. He almost just tosses the ball high and lets it drop on his racket, with little racket movement. Do you think the best return is a push or a flick?
If the ball is outside of the white line on the BH side, you would just move to the ball. Stepping the right foot under the table is for when the table is in the way of the stroke. Does this answer your question? I don't know since you gave a very minimal description of the scenario and a description, no matter how detailed would not show the scenario. Therefore, to answer your question adequetly, you would need to show some video footage of the exact scenario.
But from your posts, you still seem to be thinking in a very small box: "what is the correct way to return this particular serve." When you are more skilled at returning serves you will understand that there is always many ways to return any serve and reading the serve accurately enough, at some point, should get you to be able to make good choices on what returns will be most effective based on the player on the other side of the table.....again, the opponent and reading the opponent would still be part of the equation.
But to get to that point, you need to experiment and explore multiple different ways of touching and returning serves. That is the work, letting yourself not get balls on the table to see how different ways of touching the ball will cause the ball to react on a particular serve. Do you touch soft, hard, do you touch the back, the bottom, the left side, the right side, left-bottom, left-top......you need to explore to figure what happens when you touch the same serve in different ways.
In theory, with the right way of touching the ball, any of the above angles could work on any spin although some will be easier to control and some will be harder to control. And theoretically, if you swing hard enough with the right trajectory, with the right contact, you can knock any spin off any ball and put your own spin onto it.
So, you need to stop thinking about right and wrong and exploring how different ways of contacting the ball and contacting the ball on different points will produce different results.