Hm, yeah, I can definitely see your perspective. I've only interacted with members of, for example, Cuba and China's communist parties; so that paints the picture for me in my mind of what a communist party looks like.

I think to answer your question though, I guess I focus on two things;

A) A clear path of continuation, explicitly bound institutions which allow the next generation to pick up the mantle of running whatever revolution, and this requires institutions in my experience

B) An ability to survive through crisis, for example, if an anarchist project were able to bring huge progress in a short period of time, what use would it be if that project was then crushed by better organized and better funded imperialists or capitalists within a matter of years if not months?

I guess for me, I see that positive change only happens over long periods of time. The projects and solutions we have to environmental decay, economic democracy, etc all require these two things which socialist projects (not all, unfortunately, but enough to learn from) have shown an ability to do. If we don't engage with what's worked historically and build and improve that, we might as well be theorizing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.