That's cool. I know I've had my questions before too. Some of this is just due to the fact that we don't have the benefit that capitalism has had of centuries of expiramentation to tweak things. And not like we're able to test socialism in a lab. The socialist project is and will be for a while very much an expiramentation process. I tend to give China and Cuba a lot slack because I think they are actively trying out what works and what doesn't.

That said, there's a whole lot of good writing and videos out there that address a lot of this. One I'm partial to is Towards a New Socialism. The authors try to evaluate one large socialist project (the USSR), identify what they think went wrong, and what can be done about it in the future. There's lots of stuff like that out there and frankly I think it's pretty cool.

Now about your specific example... bog standard Marxism would say that people should be compensated for work, whether with currency or a form of labor voucher. So with Marx for example, you'd have your necessities of life provided for but you get paid in vouchers for time worked at the factory factory for consumer goods or whatever. Most socialists I know are not in favor of completely disconnecting work from compensation.