Yeah that's probably it. Couldn't be anything else.
Sarcasm aside, in case you sincerely don't understand my logical problem with what you've been trying to say, here it is.
You claim "neocons" are people who advocate stuff like X, Y, Z for reason A.
When pressed for examples of "neocons", you tend to say stuff like "well take those people, Them, who advocated Y." Thus conveniently forgetting the "for reason A" part of the argument.
And when I ask you "but what if they were advocating X for reason B", you're silent or change the subject a little.
There's a loose end in there that you continually fail to tie up, which results in your "neocon" definition being either vacuous (because you never quite demonstrate the existence of anyone who advocates X, Y, Z for reason A) or straw-man (because you implicitly deny the logical possibility of advocating X, Y, Z for reason B). It's never both vacuous and straw-man at the same time, of course, because you vacillate between the two constantly, when the discussion demands it.
That's about the long and short of why your spirited defense of the "neocon" term confuses, and I don't know how else to explain it, and don't really want to write any more opuses about it. But frankly, I shouldn't have to, because I believe that you're more than smart enough to see what I'm saying.
You just really, really need the word "neocon". For some reason.
I think your hangup is that you really believe that I do. That seems to be why you're making such a complicated issue out of something really so simple. A neoconservative is a conservative interventionist. That may involve some gray areas as with anything else, but most people don't need to have explained to them in trifling detail what a conservative is (to the point where they "honestly" can't understand why Bill Clinton isn't a conservative) and what an interventionist is.
There's a loose end in there that you continually fail to tie up, which results in your "neocon" definition being either vacuous (because you never quite demonstrate the existence of anyone who advocates X, Y, Z for reason A) or straw-man (because you implicitly deny the logical possibility of advocating X, Y, Z for reason B).
This is a case in point of you making things more complicated than they need to be. Some liberals may believe in social welfare because it's "for the children". Others may say that they advocate it for more practical reasons, such as keeping society from falling apart, and some of those may actually even believe it. In the final analysis, none of this really makes them any less leftist.
It's a similar principle with neoconservatives. Whether they do it because they're following some imagined biblical command, or because it's a good long-term insurance policy, or for some other reason, what's clear is that they have an interventionist political instinct in foreign affairs that's loosely analogous to the domestic liberal interventionist bent. It's thus referred to as "neo"conservatism because it represents a new (relatively speaking) trend in conservatism, which traditionally has disdained interventionism. Back to that difference I pointed out to you earlier, about pushing in one direction vs. pushing in the other.