This is literally, at best, just an aesthetic change, but you are glossing over the part where having a disjunction between socialist rhetoric and actions is detrimental to socialism. Bernie calling himself a socialist isn't actually helpful to us when he says "No, not like Cuba, like Denmark." All he is doing is making socialist either mean "liar" or mean nothing at all.

Obviously he should be harder on Israel. And obviously he can't and win the race.

Do you actually have evidence of this? People would have said the same thing about the Primary and then he won. Most Americans country-wide have a disfavorable view of Israel, and New York City is similar, just more polarized.

You're just digging a hole for more people to be misled into being conciliatory socdems who steal valor from actual socialists while disparaging actually socialist positions. There are many countries where the socialist have been much more successful historically than in the US, but they were co-opted and now there are communist parties that are genuinely just nationalist liberals and similar, and their existence is a detriment to the actual left. If you monofocus on colors and shapes and dismiss issues of substance, you won't be able to develop the pattern recognition to see that this is hurting us overall when people pretend to be socialists.