Comment by oneplane

Bare C GUI applications with somewhat modern integration are always that 'verbose' when compared to older or framework-based ones.

I do wonder about MS-DOS on different machines, technically it would be the BIOS and VBIOS doing much of the heavy lifting so vendor variations might have a real impact here. Same as a CSM on UEFI; DOS wouldn't know the difference, but traversing a firmware that as as complex (or more complex) from DOS would cause a whole lot of extra latency.