The AF guy only became a mangaka later on. When he did AF it was just fanfics for fun. Pretty much like me doing bhtsy but if I later got a real job writing a manga. He worked on GT and helped out with some character designs for Super. I'm not much of a fan of his stuff mainly because I get bored of robots. If you see a robot character in GT or Super odds are that they were designed by the AF guy. It does remind me a lot of how Toriyama keeps making villains the same. Thankfully the editor does step in to remind him that he has already drawn some characters. (from his interviews I seriously think her forgets).
Still yeah Toriyama got full off bullshit over the years. He reminds me of Miyamoto from nintendo at times. Legends and respectable in their own right but they should be locked away in a retirement facility and monitored while heavily medicated for some of the dumb ass things they say and do. If we go off of earliest Goku day 1 of meeting Bulma his interest was living alone and eating. When he met Bulma she convinced him to help her, there was even a line that Goku says as to why he needs to go with her and that was " Grandpa Gohan always told me that I should always help a girl". Bulma says something along the lines of how Your grandpa must have been really smart.
So his first motivation was because his grandpa told him to help people "namely girls". Through Dragonball there were many episodes where everyone else wanted to move on, but Goku wanted to stay and help. Half of the muscle tower arc was just him helping Snow's village and Android 8. Then there was him training at Korin's tower to save that indian kids dad that got killed by Tao. Most of the Dragonball fights he was in he even gave his opponents a chance to backout before the fight, and would just end up murdering them in cold blood if they didn't. In DB he kills hundreds of people, him and Yajarobi even eat Drum one of the mutant namekians that Piccolo made. Z though he only kills 2 enemies being Yakon who ate SS energy till he exploded and Kid Buu.