I agree. DOS games are much too diverse and complicated for general solutions, that's inherent to computer games in contrast to console games. If you lose the manual aspects, you will lose its configurability and have a lot of titles cease working. Really the only way to automate things/make stuff easier is to deal with it on a game-by-game basis. But that should not be the task of DOSBox. For example, programs like D-Fend Reloaded (which I use myself) allow for very intricate profiling and packaging of games. Referring players who do not want to read many instructions to such a frontend and providing them with game-specific profiles seems like the best option.
In fact, I have made the experience that even people who weren't around for the DOS gaming days are often interested in the whole aspect of installation, setup, typing the command etc. and if you think about it, it's part of why you play old games in the first place, really. With the added advantage that while back in the day it was often a long chore with no guarantee of success, in DOSBox you can install, configure and run most games without problem. If you lose everything that places the game in its DOS environment, and just have a shortcut to double-click, you lose a lot of the authenticity, which I think many people enjoy.
That being said, I once used an inofficial CVS build (Daum's?) that had a menu bar in which you could directly set many of the options. I could see something like that work in an official build - nothing much GUI-like with automation and all that, just a quick way to change environment variables without having to type a lot of DOSBox-specific commands. I wouldn't see a big problem in allowing users to do a "Drives -> Mount C: -> Directory selection dialogue" instead of a "mount c: d:\mydir\"
