I was kind of happy with MSDOS 2.11, I felt that they'd got the basics in place (in particular hard disk / subdirectory support) and that bloat hadn't started. From memory I used this for years and years although I was young so time didn't rush past so quickly so who really knows. I kept a version of MSDOS 2.11 debug.com around for decades (patched with itself so it wouldn't just do a version check then quit). From memory it was something like 12K bytes whereas debug.exe from MSDOS 6.x was more like 60K bytes.