I don’t think the reason people liked the full switch to NT is because of GUI “enforcement”, but rather that x86 DOSs had some historical limitations, both because of the OS and because of peculiarities regarding the IBM PC platform (like “conventional”, “extended” and “high” memory, or many DOS programs expecting real mode operation) which NT and its HAL abstracted away, making it more stable, though not as stable as any base *nix system.
I don’t think the reason people liked the full switch to NT is because of GUI “enforcement”, but rather that x86 DOSs had some historical limitations, both because of the OS and because of peculiarities regarding the IBM PC platform (like “conventional”, “extended” and “high” memory, or many DOS programs expecting real mode operation) which NT and its HAL abstracted away, making it more stable, though not as stable as any base *nix system.