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Ding ding ding. Or at least, I'm far from convinced that a lot of things called "communist" are bad in all circumstances. There's more than one thing that gets called "communism" by laymen, though.
Communism-proper - what the Marxists call communism. Note that the Marxist nations have never claimed to achieve communism; the USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the PRC claims to have "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Communism, as the Marxists define it, is a state of enlightenment where no government or money is necessary because people want to help each other. Communism does work on small scales - as the name suggests, communes - where Dunbar's number is not exceeded and rare exploiters can't hide. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism would probably also work with minimal shepherding due to abundance. Genetically engineering humans for greater altruism would probably also work. Outside of those three cases, this is in opposition to human nature and can't work - even Marx TTBOMK thought this would take a very long time and some sort of change in human nature to happen. With regard to policies that attempt to move things in the direction of communism outside of trying to create those cases, point out that loads of people are greedy/lazy/evil. If that doesn't work, then yeah, I think you are back to "tell them to shut up and take it".
Command economy, partial or total. In other words, decide how much of X gets made and what attributes X has by some means other than "what will maximise profit for the makers of X?", for some or all values of X. I think there are some very real gains to be made in this area. Controlled obsolescence, for instance, is entirely a product of a capitalist system, as is modern predatory advertising, as are the predatory features of social media. I also think the losses could be made less severe these days than they were in the 20th century, because we have these nice things called computers to crunch economic numbers for us. There is a big skill-dependence, though, so while trying to command the economy is IMO not inherently dumb, many specific attempts to command the economy are dumb, and they can be opposed on their individual merits.
I would compare capitalism to training a LLM using reinforcement learning, while a command economy is trying to program a LLM directly, manually with only whatever inputs you type in yourself by hand. I don't know that I would describe it as "inherently dumb", but it is systematically going to fail because there is way too much data for you to handle. The modern economy is the most ridiculously complex system that any living being has ever constructed, and it's a miracle that it works as well as it does, despite all the bugs.
Capitalism's main strength is not that it rewards people who deserve to be rewarded (though it sometimes does that), it's that to aligns incentives and sends signals via prices. How are you going to figure out whether a cheap Chinese wooden spoon for $1 is a better deal than a fancy hand crafted artisan wooden spoon for $10? Or whether the cheap Chinese knife for $5 is better deal than a fancy stainless steel knife for $10? Value is created by satisfying customer preferences, and these are often implicit and hard to capture just via surveys or whatever objective list of standards your command economy is going to use. But customer preferences and buying patterns? Those are powerful. Not infinitely powerful, they can be tricked, but still pretty powerful. And automatically applied in free market capitalism. You can invent a brand new product that nobody has ever heard of before and nobody knows what properties of it are valuable or how much in relation to each other, and capitalism will automatically figure it out emergently in real time as people decide whether or not to buy it.
Your command economy is not powerful enough, it is not smart enough, it's going to have bugs. And so is the capitalist economy, but it has fewer, just like a reinforcement trained LLM is going to have fewer bugs than a hand-crafted one. And when we're in the economy bugs mean poverty.
Social media has caused a depression epidemic so bad suicide's a notable cause of death and torn the politics of half the West asunder by serving up Shiri's Scissor for clicks. Offshoring manufacturing has left the Chinese with a significant strategic advantage. Over a percent of US GDP is thrown down the drain on advertising, plus whatever's lost to obesity as a result of that advertising, plus 4% on the bloated financial sector.
Yes, the USSR sucked at command economy. But you've got to admit that cybersocialism hasn't actually been tried (aside from Project Cybersyn, which was never fully implemented AIUI before Pinochet shut it down and AFAIK seemed to work okay - also we've many orders of magnitude more computing power than the early 1970s); you're basically asking me to take it on faith that it'd necessarily be more terrible.
It's not the computing power, it's the actually putting in all the parameters. We're talking about people's preferences for which goods and services are more valuable compared to others. Which is worth more, tickets for a Taylor Swift concert, or a food dehydrator? A gallon of gas or a gallon of milk? A fancy looking shirt with a flower print or a comfy shirt that feels silky smooth? Is it worth paying an extra $5 on your grocery bill if the store is literally across the street instead of making you drive halfway across town for the cheaper store? What if it's an extra $20? Is it worth an extra $10 to get chicken flavored cat food instead of whitefish because your cat refuses to eat the latter?
All of these are variables which are going to depend on the specific customers and the idiosyncrasies of their preferences and their lifestyles. And these in turn emergently place demands on the economy. How do you know how much chicken flavored cat food to produce versus how much whitefish except via the demands placed by customers? But what if the chicken flavored cat food costs $10 more to produce (or the equivalent in terms of resources and labor), so it's inefficient and you want to disincentivize people from buying it unless they actually prefer it to the whitefish. Ie customers buy it if and only if it's actually going to improve their lives (via their cats health and happiness) by at least $10 worth of value.
How do you capture all of that, simultaneously understanding customer preferences AND incentivize customers to choose more efficient options while still allowing deviations if they want/need the more expensive version badly enough AND update in realtime as supply and demand change AND keep the manufacturers and whoever is in charge of the system from exploiting the crap out of it to enrich all their friends and political allies?
Obviously capitalism doesn't solve all of those issues entirely. But competition and the threat of bankruptcy does an excellent job of keeping things grounded in some reality. Negative feedback loops. It can get kind of bad, but if it goes too far off the rails the company goes bankrupt and gets replaced, even if nobody understands why. It's emergent. Nobody can understand and predict the entire economy at once. With capitalism you don't have to, and it mostly kinda works anyway. With socialism small problems get magnified and snowball because nobody can enrich themselves by fixing them.
You don't, but "how much chicken is bought vs. how much whitefish" is pretty easy to record and I'm not suggesting that it not be an input to your equations. I'm also not suggesting that money be abolished; that's really more of a communist thing than a socialist thing, and while I certainly wouldn't object to Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism I don't see a path there in the foreseeable future other than "gamble the human race on neural net AI not going Skynet on our arses" (which is unconscionable).
I'm saying "command economy with information tech" hasn't actually been tried and found wanting; it's been left untried. So I hear your position ("the economy is too complicated for command to work"), but I'm left quite sceptical; I think it's worth giving it a serious go somewhere (not everywhere at once; I'm not a lunatic).
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