What really are the full capabilities of Awakening?

[Trusk'our Spinner]

I know that awakening mostly is used to animate organic objects and corpses, but we can see from Nightblood's existence and Hoid's memories being stored in breath that more is obviously possible. 

So, what could awakening be used for? Ideas on how it could interact with other magic systems would also be good to know. 

[Frustration Stormfather]

Even Endowment doesn't know

[Honorless Lord Ruler]

There's also the moment where Vasher edits a little girl's memory, there's a bunch of topics that try to analyse that:

Part of people's minds are in the Cognitive, it seems, that plus their Spiritwebs are made of Investiture. Their "spark of life" is Investiture. Breath is a plug in. A very easily editable plug-in. I think Breath is just a particularly adaptable and editable piece of Investiture, you just need a lot of it to do anything and people generally only have one so they need to collect more. I mean, if it can power stuff and it can store data, you can input data into it and program it, and it can interact with the literal base programming of reality, it can probably do anything?

[Quantus Knight Radiant]

I think they can do Just about anything other Investiture can do, with enough Training and the appropriate Command (and the Intent of the mental images to guide it).  It seems the most adaptable of the investitures, adapting and shedding Identity more readily than the others, moving freely to invest physical objects, and take Commands largely through pure Intent.  I would not be at all surprised to find they could be used to charge any other source of Investiture with a relatively simple Command (ie. Charge a metalmind or gem, etc).  It might take more mental gymnastics around the Commands but I suspect when taken to their Sci-fi extreme they will be able to mimic most other cosmere effects.  We know they allow for Worldhopping, and it seems they can Connect you to the Local enough to get the language translation effect.  We know they give a lot of benefits just by being Invested in the Physical form of a person (ie the Heighenings) which appear to be a direct linear scale of improvement for traits like Senses, Mental Intuition, Age, and Health, as well as more overall metaphysical Mass when it comes to overcoming other Investiture effects.  

TInfoil: I suspect they are a post-shattering Investiture manifestation that is mimicking the Dawnshards themselves, or at least the one of them.  

 

As far as I can see there are really only a few specific limitations to them:

• They need (and use up) Color to move, which is a mechanism we don't yet understand
• They struggle to effect non-organic materials far more than organic matter. 
• "The nature of the Warbreaker magic is tied to the shard of Endowment, which is about giving. There are, therefore, things you cannot do for yourself."  One example is healing yourself.  (per WoB)