I'm not all that surprised by freedos booting slower actually. It tends to be significantly more feature rich than the DOSes of the day, and as a result tends to be quite heavy for the 16-bit machines.
My main wish for it would be serial console support. I have "old" industrial boards (386EX, 512K of non-expandable RAM, 8-bit bus, but made in '02). It has a BIOS and an in-ROM variant of DOS by a company called General Software. It has no built-in video hardware and uses a serial console by default.
I installed FreeDOS with a video card installed, added the ctty entry in autoexec.bat, powered down, and removed the graphics card.
The FreeDOS kernel messages came out at boot (over serial), but when it got to command.com, it just started printing '.' characters to my serial console. To be fair, I really didn't spend much time debugging.
My main wish for it would be serial console support. I have "old" industrial boards (386EX, 512K of non-expandable RAM, 8-bit bus, but made in '02). It has a BIOS and an in-ROM variant of DOS by a company called General Software. It has no built-in video hardware and uses a serial console by default.