>>101. Agreed, this is good.
2. Debatable? BASICA/GW-BASIC/QBASIC (depending on which version of DOS you're using) can be seen as sort of a last hurrah of the old microcomputer tradition of having a built-in BASIC programming interface, even if DOS didn't typically boot up directly to it. Any of those BASICs could be annoyingly limited past a certain point though and getting something with more power was usually a matter of buying commercial software packages, back in the height of the DOS era; AFAIK free compilers that worked on DOS weren't much of a thing until its heyday was already over.
3. Mostly agreed, and much of it followed from point 1; being able to just access certain ports or memory addresses to write out data has a certain learning curve but I still feel it's mostly easier than having to go through some horrible API layers to ask for things like "pretty please may I access the graphics". Some of the hardware design choices you have to work with are still "INTERESTING" though.
Real mode being easier than protected mode is highly debatable, though, when you get into segmented memory / the infamous 640K barrier and the ways EMS/XMS tried to work around it. If your project is small enough not to worry too much about those things, then yeah, you're fine.
Windows 9x definitely gets into being rather another beast altogether, unless you're exiting out to the DOS environment.