How do you actually do that? I ran mine for years with a single, borderless full screen CLI window but that hardly disabled the windowing system, you could still run GUI apps.
You can edit the boot script (s:startup-sequence, I think... it's been a while.) so it doesn't start Workbench. However, you can't really disable the windowing system.
My recollection too was while you didn't need Workbench itself, windowing and the multi screen support was all ROM based and always there.
I'm guessing they just removed LoadWB from their startup-sequence
Yes, that's all you could do. Sounds like just a slight memory fault exaggerating it, something I'm sure we're all guilty of. Booting "exclusively to amigaDOS, without the ...windowing system available" was not possible, as the CLI ran in a window.
This is correct. I just can't quite remember the exact details nowadays. But now you say it, I think that is what I had, just a single cli window :)
You could use alternative shells, though, and they weren't quite as painful. Bill Hawes's 'wsh' was rather nice.