It's true that there are a lot of nostalgia over here, but it's just that - people tend to remember all the good bits and none of the bad ones when recounting the past

Well, that wasn't the case during the early 1990s, there were massive problems created through the dismantling of communism in Eastern Europe that ruined millions of lives, and many people regret switching systems at that time. You know this saying, "we knew what the government said of itself was wrong, what we didn't expect is that what they said about capitalism was true".

people recall how things were cheaper rather than how their loved ones were sent to concentration camps for being "too intelligent therefore a potential revolutionary threat" (happened to my grandpa)

Probably because labour-camp-type repression was mostly confined to a 5-year period leading up to WW2. It's a characteristic of systems under heavy pressure. McCarthyism is an example of this. That doesn't justify soviet oppression during Stalinism, it was extremely harsh and mostly arbitrary and unjustified and a product of hysteria. But that doesn't deny that hundreds of millions of people were freed from Tsarism and imperialism and lived a life free of economic exploitation, with guaranteed education, healthcare, pensions, jobs and housing.

There's also the fact that the satellite states were viewed by Soviets as "resource wells" rather than actual settlements, so rather than developing them they'd act more like a monarch and designate collective farms from which they'd take the majority of produce.

Can you pass me a good source about this with numeric data about it? Sounds interesting.