The DOS Word was actually pretty good but, yes, there was a lot of competition for (incompatible) word processors at the time which basically continued until Office on Windows basically squashed it all. Latterly you had pretty good text-based user interfaces and, as you say, there were lots of kludges like TSRs, Double DOS, etc. that filled in a lot of gaps in the original DOS.

The other problem is that PCs basically weren't fast enough for full graphical interfaces at the time. So there was a period when DOS was acceptably fast for most purposes and Windows really wasn't even when it started to get reasonably usable in the Windows 3.0 timeframe.