Oh yes indeed. That particular quote - "Much of the new policy of the Americans in publicising the latest Soviet weapons systems and military strengths is aimed at maintaining US levels of defence expenditure against an increasingly recalcitrant Congress." - strikes me in the same way as you, was it a genuine mistake due to ignorance, over-estimation brought about by fear/paranoia or deliberate hyperbole to get more money for the military budget?
But yes, no matter what brought it about, that information was viewed in a particular way by the public and that seems to have worked in favour of a larger military budget.
I still have some of the aircraft books I bought from back in that time and when it came to the new unknown fighters (I believe they were identified as Ramskoye prototypes or something like that before they were found out to be MiG-29 and so on), the trend tends to be to overestimate their potential capabilities. But ultimately, the US strategy of forcing the Soviets to spend more of their GNP on their military worked. Was releasing these estimates/data about Soviet equipment part of that strategy? I certainly don't know but I can easily see that it could have been.
And I have no disagreements with you about Soviet equipment. The Soviets had a different mindset for their designs and sometimes this had significant advantages as witnessed by my post about T-34's mounted as memorials being brought back to driving capacity for use in parades and by The Dark's post about an IS-2 being recovered from a memorial and put into use during the Ukraine conflict. As the article I was referencing inferred, sometimes the simpler "cruder" designs are better for the end user than the more sophisticated, complex designs - particularly when it comes to who the end user is. A lot of Soviet equipment was designed specifically knowing that conscripts would be either operating it, or maintaining/servicing it.
Stalin's statement of "Quantity has a quality all its own" was better suited for the level of technical expertise expected from Soviet conscript troops.
The Soviets certainly had some outstanding areas of expertise, their knowledge of theoretical physics was apparently better than the West's, they were further advanced than the West in terms of supersonic thrust vectoring for aircraft although the counterbalance to a lot of those advantages was their lower levels of metallurgical knowledge (hence the use of titanium for aircraft where the West was using alloys).
So after all my blathering, my point is, like every organism that has ever existed, the Soviet Union was a more complex beast than the simplistic observation of "they make peasant weapons for use by a peasant army".
And further to that, my point is - it's easy now to criticise GDW's treatment of the Soviet threat and to note how much weaker the Soviets really were but back when GDW was designing the game, we were living under a cloud of the Doomsday Clock, "WW3 at any minute", "Reds under the bed", the Soviets being the largest exporter of weapons in the world, Soviet sponsored terrorism in the West and numerous proxy wars being fought between the great powers and so on.
Given the potential fear that that engendered, I believe we can give the GDW crew some leeway in designing a game that was built around the very real fears of the time.
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