I was a brief DOS user for several months (in between C64 and discovering UNIX) around the early 90's, and my opinions of it from the time mostly align with you

I was a brief DOS user for several months (in between C64 and discovering UNIX) around the early 90's, and my opinions of it from the time mostly align with yours. I think the early 90's was an especially rough period for DOS users, because people were trying to push it way beyond what it was originally meant to be. However, while I certainly don't have nostalgia for DOS in general, there were some positive things about the platform and ecosystem. Some subset of applications had TUI interfaces that were very nice (e.g. Borland C++), and while I'm a die-hard Linux terminal user, I find myself occasionally missing some of the tightness of those interfaces. (I think the UNIX terminal heritage, such as the "alt" key translating to ESC+key, no key-down/key-up events, etc., can limit our modern TUI interfaces.) I sometimes tinker with some 8086 emulator code for fun, which can lead me to diving into the internals of DOS. Looking at its API (and how the API evolved through the 80's), I can appreciate the simplicity that was necessary to run on machines with as little as 64KB of memory. So I may not have nostalgia for it -- there was certainly plenty of pain -- but it can still be very interesting to explore from an objective historical perspective. There may even be a few things we can learn from it.