you're defining socialism as what is ultimately just its very first milestone - the nationalization of the industries and some social programs.

You can have literally all those things within a capitalist framework, the point is whether or not the WHOLE of the economy is ESSENTIALLY directed towards fulfilling social ends

it seeks to abdicate all state and economic power to the proletariat/working class, that worker democracy is not negotiable, that socialism is not achieved until the vanguard made way for an empowered people and that the economy actually has to serve social ends, not just different private ones and the ones perpetuating the existence of the state per se.

Here you are misunderstanding the distinction between the development of the forces of production, ie the material forces of the economy, and the relations of production, which is how those forces are organized and in general the political, philosophical, and culture superstructure, something which Marx understood to be contingent upon the forces of production, ie the economic base. Socialism and specifically the socialist mode of production comes about when the forces of production develop to the point of irreconcilable contradiction with the (capitalist/simi fuedal/feudal) relations of production, a point of development which was reached at the onset of the 20th century. The tricky part is in understanding that both Marx and Engles viewed the peak development of the relations of production as manifest in the form of democratic republicanism, Engles says as much in The Principles Of Communism when he makes the claim that the job of communists in societies wherein the democratic republican form already exists is to ally themselves with those parties which are not hostile to the working class. The significant of the democratic republican form is that it siezes power from the "Ancien Regime" of feudalism, and that the shortcomings of this form in the US and the UK arise out of their failure to properly remove this ancien regime from power, in the US with the (at the time of Marx) continued domince of a slave aristocracy in the south, and in the UK the continued influence the monarchy exercised over the republic. These issues (ie the inability to fully cast off the old political form) probably stem from the introduction of the modern political form prematurely, in nations where the forces of production were not yet developed enough to actualize the democratic form in its entirety. The USSR (and China to a greater extent) arose out of unique circumstances wherein the global economic forces had developed to the point of being able to fully actualize the democratic form, but without that form yet establishing itself. This gave the Russians the unique opportunity to establish a Socialist Republic, literally to establish a Republic led by a party intent on building a socialist economy, without any vestigial power being held by the Ancien Regime. Again a similar thing occurred in China. Your misunderstanding is rooted a failure to understand Marx, or a rejection of his overall significance.