I can't believe I'm saying this about a Microsoft product, but I think I prefer MS-DOS!
Yeah, I can't fault you for that, and I banished Windows on my personal systems over 20 years ago. The installer leaves you with a fairly sane system and programs of the day all targeted it.
For FAT32 support, I think your options are FreeDOS, stealing DOS from Windows 98, or IBM PC-DOS 7.1.
For both FreeDOS and Win98 DOS I like to install by running
fdisk c: /s
, copying files, and creating autoexec.bat and config.sys manually. This avoids a lot of bloat and complexity that I don't care for.
It's been a while since I did PC DOS, but I think I did it by installing PC-DOS 2000 and then replacing files with new versions from PC-DOS 7.1 (7.1 is not a retail release like 2000).
Why the choices?
I find the FreeDOS kernel to be bigger & slower and works best on faster PCs.
I
think Win98 DOS has good compatibility? Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut says it's as good as MS-DOS 6.22. It does not boot on older processors though.
PC-DOS has a smaller memory footprint while retaining the features of a moden DOS. Not usually a big deal, but this is why I use it on my 8088.
...of course, you could be reasonable and simply use a FAT16 USB stick for file transfers LOL