I think this also touches on the other thing that makes TempleOS cool. It was designed as a modern C64, and a lot of the weird design decisions come directly from that. It's a hacker's operating system and it shows.
I seem to remember seeing a different take on hackable operating systems, something written in Scheme with a PreScheme core I think? I remember thinking it was pretty cool. The dynamic nature of Scheme allowed you to have access to pretty much anything you want, but also run programs with less privileges.
Of course there's also DuskOS. It's written in Forth which I like, but I'm not the biggest fan of their dialect. I'd like to attempt something in a more classical Forth, but I never get to it. One of these days...