Dusk OS' primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there are many modern computers still around.
As communities become isolated and those machines begin to break down, they will need to be used in creative manners if one wants to use them at all. The complexity of modern operating systems will hinder this creativity and make its success less likely.
Dusk OS, through simplicity, aims to minimally hinder this creativity and provide as many tools as possible to help it.
Maximally use the hardware, alright, but what for? While the ultimate purpose of these computers is open ended, Dusk OS is developed and optimized for a few of those purposes that are expected to be important during civilizational collapse.
We have enormous amounts of knowledge stored on media that is only accessible through the use of a modern computer. Some of this knowledge will be of vital importance to different communities as they become isolated. Access to this knowledge will have a big influence on the fate of those communities.
Therefore, one of Dusk's primary purposes is to be able to access as many kinds of storage media as possible, through as many kinds of encodings (filesystems, file formats, compression algorithms, etc.) as possible and present them in a way that humans can consume (view it on a screen, print it to paper, etc.).
Collapse OS' primary goal stays true for Dusk OS: managing electricity will always be immensely useful. Collapse OS fullfils that goal through very simple computers, but at the cost of heavy constraints. As long as modern hardware stays available, Dusk OS will be preferable to Collapse OS because it's more powerful and convenient.
Therefore, we want to be able to repurpose modern hardware in wicked ways to achieve goals with severely limited means. For example, one could imagine repurposing a router's ethernet connectors to do simple bit banging to control an adhoc circuit. Dusk is designed to maximally allow that.
Move bytes around, slice them, dice them, examine them. One of Dusk OS' primary purposes is to provide a powerful, flexible, efficient shell. That's something that a Forth environment provides naturally.
In Dusk, we just want to make sure that all the bells and whistles that makes a operators feel happy are there.