As the author of jonesforth[1], I found Forth to be a great hack and enormous fun to write. However as an actual language to implement things, not so good. It's terribly difficult to write correct code when you've got no bounds checking, only primitive memory management, no types, and having to manage the stack. (Modern Forths fix these problems to some extent.)
It's my understanding that most language research is on safety features, type systems and so on, so I don't know how interesting Forth would be.