> I think the point was: why bother with mtools when you can do...
>	mount -t msdos /dev/fd0a /mnt
> ... and read and write it with native unix commands?

If you just have a few files to do, "mwrite *.txt b:" is easier to type than
"mount -t msdos /dev/fd0a /mnt ; cp *.txt /mnt ; umount /mnt"; don't think of
MSDOS-FS as a filesystem, think of it as a floppy archive format. ;-)  Also,
mtools will do easy end-of-line translation.  The downsides of mtools include
not knowing about long filenames, poor handling of some errors (but nicer
handling of out-of-space), and the fact that I have lost the source to the
particular version I use which had the ability to read the configuration from
a file rather than having a moronic compiled-in table...