basically saying it does everything it can to follow core
Wrong. It is saying it does everything to follow the consensus rules.
it just wants to follow core, including the bugs. just in a different language.
rather than know what the rules are and have its own less cludgy, buggy methods of doing things to get to the same result
Bugs don't mean what you think they mean.
Two examples of "bugs" of the top of my head are counting sigs in coinbase signature script (sigopcount) and popping an extra item from the stack in OP_CheckMultiSig(Verify).
These are part of the consensus rules that all implementations should follow.