I'll try to be a little bit concise on the first parts since I feel like you highlighted the more important parts clearly at the end. But:

- I agree that academics and labour aristocracy were very discontent during the perestroika years especially, but it's also worth noting that these were liberal free market reforms. Scientists and technical workers during the 50s to 70s lived in a guilded age. The misery arrived when Gorbachev started to transition Soviet culture from science and education to western consumerism. So I agree with your observation, but I wouldn't call the perstroika years socialism, it was social democracy. So I think your perspective is entirely consistent with my own worldview, Gorbachev was a terrible man.

- As for affluence vs. well paid jobs, I do disagree with this. What they wanted was luxury homes, personal high end cars, summer homes, etc. They wanted to be rich. To be well paid is to live a comfortable life, but they wanted status symbols and higher level luxuries. There is a difference between safety and comfort and affluence. DDR offered the former, in fact, they offered it in abundance compared to the west. But it was at the expense of the latter.

- And I do happen to know, there's been tonnes of polls on the subject. Even the CATO institute, which is more or less Ronald Reagan's official think tank, have published polls to this effect in several former Soviet countries. The German government even did a poll that showed that 57% of former East German citizens support the DDR to this very day according to Die Spiegel. It's so common there's even a word for it called "Ostalgie." It's a bit derogatory however. Personally I think it's sort of an armchair psych dismissal of how people legitimately have suffered for decades under austerity since 1989, I think it's condescending to say 57% of people just liked the uniforms and the songs and don't quite understand what a credit economy is.

As for your bigger parts:

"— some kind of market mechanism is key to the distributed intelligence required for vibrancy within our immensely complex techno-societies. It is also needed in order to provide a require incentive structure."

I agree with this. All Marxist-Leninist states have had markets and exchange. That's never been an issue. Only opposition is to capitalism, which produces parasitic relationships between owners and workers. Instead of having every workplace being managed like a feudal fiefdom, it should instead be democratically managed by a labour union, which can then delegate influence to the state, an in such a way produce a kind of "double democracy" known as democratic centralism.

"— free markets reward power. Thus they are inherently unstable as power seeks to increase power. Even in the face of democratic control of the market, there is ample evidence that power can subvert democracy essentially by ‘buying’ off certain segments of the citizenry to manage the laws against the greater good, and for the good of power itself."

Once again I agree, that's precisely why I like democratic centralism. Syndicalism lacks this kind of duality between delegation and executive committee, and is far more prone to opportunism.

"— The only breaks against the second effect are rules of law that limit ability of power to control. (this cannot succeed by itself since those laws can be subverted or changed.) The second break against this is a population that simply believes in societal goods, and are will not support power’s bid for more power. I do see some countries as being much better than others in this national consciousness."

This I don't see much evidence of however. I think limiting power is a paradox. Who exactly does that? How do people with the power limit the power that they must exercise in order to limit said power? The answer is more power, which is distributed among even more people, so that there are secondary and tertiary institutions who can confront the state mechanism both using direct and indirect leverage. This is why it is so vital to have a large national union system that can contend with the state mechanism, and a militia system that creates a civil administration based on electoral and sortitioning principles rather than just hired goon squads in blue.

"— incentives: A little dab will do. My view is that the collectivist approaches have been shown to dramatically under-perform. One needs to incentivise a class within society to completely remake things, over and over. This is how tech progress moves so fast in some places. At the same time, it seems one can train and motivate such a class w/o them having the immense power they gain in places like the USA. There needs to be winners and loosers, but the winners need not win so much, and the loosers need not loose everything."

Once again I disagree. The Soviet Union was a third world country that became an industrial superpower in 20 years. Western individualist systems needed 150 million African slaves to do this, and then another 200 million Indians, over the course of a century. Also, China is currently inventing flying cars whilst Americans think vaccines were invented by sneaky Jews who are trying to give everyone autism.

So I'm sorry but this is simply not the case. The East has won every competition. We were the first to go to space, we industrialised the fastest, we killed the most Nazis, we desegregated first, we published the most books, we were the first to fully electrify a country, we had the most environmentally sustainable infrastructure, gave women's rights first, we always excel and then it gets buried in propaganda.

"I don’t have alot of opinion (or knowledge) about the politics of NATO. Certainly all groups seek to maximize power and control that the group has, and often use emotional appeals to justify action needed. Fine, I am a cynic about the world in that way, but I see little evidence that ANY group is above this general trend."

The founding chairman of NATO was a Nazi war criminal who participated in the holocaust, they also founded the Gehlen Organisation which was made up of former Gestapo agents who were told to spy on their behalf, but since they couldn't find much useful information and they were afraid that lack of results would mean getting the noose at Nuremburg, they made up a bunch of fake documents which said that the Soviet Union was winning the arms race, which caused America to build thousands of nukes and raise escalatations to the point of where humanity almost went extinct.

And that's only the first 8 years of existing.

"You made comments about those in East Germany having one thing in their mind, when can they be as prosperous as the west. This is it in a nutshell, if you feel you can do well in a captial system that is where you want to be, if you feel you will be crushed by it, then you don’t want it. It just seems most do want it (though certainly not all… especially among the older)."

Again, I agree, this is the premise of Marxist class consciousness. The working majority oppose it, the rich minority favour it based on their class interests. Although personally I think some people can be moral too, I used to be less opposed to capitalism back when I was poor, now that I have money I find it even more vulgar because I had to leave others behind to suffer.

"p.s. we should try to find a poll taken in the last 15 years in eastern germany. I bet it heavily favors reunification… of course W germany was the wealthiest nation in Europe, so maybe that is a best case scenerio for switching from communism."

This has always been the case, but there never was any reuinification. NATO annexed the East illegally and completely purged their government. They jailed politicians and persecuted dissidents for the first 10 years of Pax Americana. No one wanted a military occupation from America. Same thing is true about North Korea. DPRK and ROK both want reunification, but DPRK do not want the same fate as Germany, they don't want to get bulldozed by American tanks, nor do they want their citizens to get beaten down by American GIs.