I suspect the attempts to standardize it and the ANSI standard actually held back Forth somewhat.. I preferred Chuck Moore's forth or forth implementations that eschewed closely to his philosophy.
> this [typo] inverts your meaning.
Actually it doesn't. "forth implementations that eschewed his philosophy" would, but "eschewed closely to" expands to "ommited [stuff] in a manner close to", where stuff would presumably mean (ANSI standard) features. So it's: "forth implementations that eschewed [junk] in a manner close to [what] his philosophy [suggests]". "Hewed" is also fairly correct (and less confusable), though.
Chuck Moore's later Forths were attempts to further simplify Forth and take alternative approaches that simply aren't as useful or applicable to the core of Forth programmers, but that Chuck enjoys. He's often said that he makes his Forths for himself and not anyone else, e.g. why he would write a color-based Forth when some people are color-blind. There have been some more applicable and less applicable factorisations, and I see his continuing influence around in different Forths; some standard, some not.
In other words: the standard held back the concept of Forth by Chuck Moore, but it helped to push forward the concept of Forth as an industrial product. A very grey area...
What Chuck Moore mostly did was focus on simplifying the problem such that he can avoid as much abstraction as possible. Which isn't a very accessible way of development perhaps.
I'm not sure if there's a good middle ground between these two approaches..