Also, if Control Characters are getting automatically converted to an Ascii displayable character, that takes away from the ability to use pointers and Control Characters in screen blocks.

I don't see the purpose of new Forths making Control Characters into printable ascii characters. Does that mean there will need to be different word definitions for different devices?

For example, displaying text to a display screen will display the Control Characters as an ascii character, but printing the text to a printer will print the Control Character as is.

Note that you don't have to give up the convenience of 1KB Blocks to have bigger screens ... you can define a "QuadScreen" as four Blocks on a divisible by four block number boundary and just build a QSCREEN editor wordset to work with four blocks and a display unit. 64x64 is plenty of room to write liberally commented sets of word definitions.