Mostly, you are absolutely right, yes. MS-DOS 5.0 was the peak, and then it started to acquire bloat as MS bundled stuff to compete with DR-DOS 6 and DR-DOS 7.
But the thing is that by modern standards, the bloat is tiny. :-)
I gave MS Office 97 a bad review at the time because it was several times bigger than Office 95, had virtually no new functionality, but introduced a pointless new file format just to get people to upgrade so they could read the files sent to them by companies with the newer version.
But for a decade now, Word 97 is my go-to version. With all the service releases installed, it works great, it's tiny by modern standards -- I think a full install of Word with all the optional filters and things totals 14MB -- and it's lightning fast on 21st century hardware.
Word 95 is even smaller and quicker, but it can't read or write the file format that everyone else, from Pages to Wordpad, uses. So it's crippled: everything has to go through LibreOffice first, to convert it to a .DOC format anything else can view, import, edit, or print.
Bloat is partially the eye of the beholder, and 6.22 wasn't terribly large by any means, but the things it added were not incredibly stable and it showed.
It's also amazing how long things like DOC to DOCX took to really "take hold" in the industry at large. I still get DOC files now and then.
No, still files called `.DOC` but with a different internal format.
There have been at least 3 successive MS Word file formats:
Word for DOS, WinWord 1/2/6/95: old .DOC format
(I think this also applies to Classic MacOS Word 1-5.)
Word 97, 2000, XP, 2003: new .DOC format
(Classic MacOS Word 98, X and 2001 were based on a port of the Windows codebase. Mac OS X Word 2004 and later are OS X-only, but are still based on the Windows codebase and use the same file formats.)
