"powerful" too often means "it does things I don't really need or that I don't even understand; but hey, I might use them someday" - or at least that's how it sounds to me.
"ugly, stupid and mean" is actually intended to the beginners or to those who want to try it. That's what most systems are out-of-the box, especially for the minimal ones (bigger systems like gForth might be a bit better).
That's their starting point. R> and R> are hideous so at one point they'll want to replace them with "pop" and "push". Stack juggling looks bad so they'll have to learn to minimize them. And they'll have to get used to RPN. There's no GC and not even heap allocation (unless ANSI-Forth added it as an extension since the last time I checked?), so they'll have to deal with the lack of memory management that are in every other high-level language. There's neither static nor dynamic type checking so they won't get any warning if they dereference a character. Instead, it will crash again and again without any stack trace.
So they'll have to deal with all this ugliness, stupidity and hostility that they won't expect "enough" because Forth fans praise it often without a warning about the fact that it takes a really long time to fully tame such a rabid language.
Why did I stick with Forth for so long? I made it progressively more beautiful for me; I learned to fight complexity and factor, which indirectly prevents mistakes; I implemented warnings in my system for mistakes that are hard to find (e.g. a redefinition) and are easy to check for.