The only thing different between what you are running and what I am running is you are on Mavericks and I'm still on 10.8.5 Safari bookmark syncing works fine for me.
- Backup your Safari bookmarks on your Mac.
- Turn off bookmark syncing on all devices.
- Quit Safari on all devices.
- Turn on bookmark syncing on your Mac and wait for the syncing to complete.
- After the Mac has finished syncing, turn on bookmark syncing on one iOS device and wait for the syncing to complete.
- Try adding a bookmark on your Mac and see if it gets synced to the iOS device, this may take a minute or so.
- If that works try a bookmark change on the iOS device and see if that syncs.
- NOTE: Bookmark change syncing seems to take longer than contact and calender changers to sync.
- After that works, do one iOS device at a time.
If that doesn't work, you may want to reset Safari everywhere and then with bookmark syncing on everywhere use the bookmarks backup on your Mac to add your bookmarks back.
I followed the steps in your post and here`s what happened:
After turning off bookmarks syncing on all devices & closing safari, i first turned on the syncing on my Mac and it started to download the bookmarks, problem is that the downloaded setup was not the same as the current setup i had on the Mac when i closed down the syncing, i noticed for example that a lot of older bookmarks i had already deleted in the past was now downloaded from iCloud again. A real mess!
So it appears that iCloud server have a different setup of bookmarks than my current setup on the Mac. One way to solve this would be to reset the iCloud safari setting on the server but i havn`t found a way to do this and i`m not even sure if it can be done?
Then, i manually deleted some of the duplicates & older bookmarks on my Mac and after this i turned on the syncing for the iOS devices again but to my surprise the setup on the iPhone,iPad was not the same as on the Mac even after i had done the manual clean up.
I also tried to add new bookmarks on my Mac but they didn`t show up on the iOS devices at all, i waited for 10 minutes i think.
Obviously, there is a problem in the syncing process, both when i download a new setup of bookmarks to a device and also the syncing between the different devices.