This is the understatement of the decade. Of course it was more powerful. I used Xenix in 1987 on an IBM PC, probably a 80286. It was a Xenix/MS-DOS dual booting system. Multiuser and multitasking with Xenix or single user and monotask with MS-DOS.
I used various flavors of Unix on Z8000 or 68k architectures in those years. All of them were obviously better than MS-DOS.
What is better critically depends on the "coordinate system". There was (and still is) something infinitely precious about MS-DOS. Simplicity, ease of accessing hardware, and all that alongside the vast multitude of extremely powerful and useful software that was available for it. In other words, DOS had something that few, if any, other OS could offer at the time.
I know this may be strange but there aren't many people left that can debug these kinds of systems. Sorry for disturbing this thread!
It's like trying to write a DVD with no burner. Where do you have a computer that still has a DVD drive burner? Same problem I'm having.