It first appeared as a product to compete with MS/PC-DOS 3.x releases in the late 1980s. XT-class machines were still on the market, and Windows was far from unchallenged dominance. If you asked in 1989 what computing would look like by 1995, "OS/2", "Unix", or "something we haven't even imagined yet" were viable guesses, probably even more so than "That clunky Windows/386 shell will subsume almost all drivers and functionality, but you'll still need a glorified version of DOS 3.3 as a bootloader."
Aside from whether DR-DOS was a compelling retail product, it served an important market purpose: it forced a price ceiling for MS-DOS. This probably spurred Microsoft's questionably-legal bundling and pricing strategy, but the end result is that OEMs weren't paying $150 for a copy of DOS through the 1990s.
Stop posting the AARD code thing as some kind of "gotcha!". AARD is irrelevant. If you want to point at anti-competitive or problematic things Microsoft did then point at things that actually mattered.
It first appeared as a product to compete with MS/PC-DOS 3.x releases in the late 1980s. XT-class machines were still on the market, and Windows was far from unchallenged dominance. If you asked in 1989 what computing would look like by 1995, "OS/2", "Unix", or "something we haven't even imagined yet" were viable guesses, probably even more so than "That clunky Windows/386 shell will subsume almost all drivers and functionality, but you'll still need a glorified version of DOS 3.3 as a bootloader."
Aside from whether DR-DOS was a compelling retail product, it served an important market purpose: it forced a price ceiling for MS-DOS. This probably spurred Microsoft's questionably-legal bundling and pricing strategy, but the end result is that OEMs weren't paying $150 for a copy of DOS through the 1990s.