The Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era USSR had a fantastic understanding of what needed to be made. Refrigerators, radios, televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and automobiles. Things that the public very clearly wanted, and that politicians were very clear about the public getting.
All of those things were consistently under-produced, and never met their quantity, or quality quotas.
And that is the problem, politicians were keen on building a TV.
You couldn't just build a TV there would be a great design competition and then a design will be selected.
The selection will be political which means that designs were not selected by market forces which favor merit but rather the whim of a corrupt and inefficient political machine.
The pricing also was an issue, economics in the USSR were screwed it was socialism bubble in a capitalistic world.
Everything had a price but the price was completely detached from the cost and the value of the product (the designers themselves could not gauge the true costs of their designs, and quite often the design that would keep as many people
employed would be favored which would cause even more inherent inefficiency)
When your TV was priced at 50$ but cost 500$ to make there will be shortages.
Additionally the USSR had a horrible problem with skilled labor despite probably having one of the better educated workforce in history.
This was because again lack of meritocracy and a free market a rocket engineer would be making as much as an engineer working on bicycle gears.
Unless you were well connected politically you also had very little choice on where would you be assigned to work.
Because of this building skills in critical industries in the commercial and consumer sectors was very hard.
There were different appliance manufacturing companies in the USSR, and consumers very clearly expressed their preferences. Different Soviet brands commanded different prices, and had different levels of demand for them.
Pricing was an issue for different reasons - some people had money that they couldn't spend, whereas other people had very little money. Food and housing were heavily subsidized but goods weren't, wages for different professions were very different (And rarely reflected the social/economic value of their work.)
It wasn't some communist paradise where everyone was equally poor. There were absolutely class and wage distinctions. An engineer building rockets was getting paid more, and had access to better stores (And priority on high-end consumer goods, that were less, or not available to the public) then one building bicycles. One way to be 'politically connected' was to work in an important industry (Specifically, defense. Being a senior manager also qualified.)
The Soviet rationing model rewarded both political parasites, and successful people[1]. A bit like 'meritocracy' works in many Western corporations, if you think about it.
The serious problems in the Soviet economy were the absolutely insane military spending, corruption, bureaucracy, theft, inconsistent accountability, and extremely conservative commandments from central management that strongly discouraged, and sometimes punished innovation and optimization.
[1] Unless you were a kolhoznik, or serf, tied to the land, a political problem, had relatives who were political problems, were one-quarter Jewish, etc.
That not true. Ph.D. in University was making the same wages as cleaner working in said University. You underestimate how ridiculous was communism. My parents after getting Masters choose to go into farming as it was better money.
Everyone has plenty money but you could not buy anything, you needed a special token to buy for example new fridge. Used products were more expensive than new. You needed to wait for everything.
People did not revolt because of propaganda and in a technological leap that happened after the war. In 1950 you will still go to the city on the horse but in 1980 everyone had running water, TV, electricity and at least a one car per village.
All of those things were consistently under-produced, and never met their quantity, or quality quotas.