Cool thread. I'm kinda burned out from the Super manga thread but there's plenty more to discuss and question.
I kinda made my position clear that although Toriyama is The Guy and always will be, he's not the sole voice in Dragon Ball, especially now that he's willingly taking a back seat while handing over the keys to other artists. Another user in the manga thread made a great point that Toriyama has never had a Larfleeze "WHAT'S MINE IS MINE, NOT YOURS" mentality to his work, he's always willing to allow others to have their creative freedom just as he has his own, partly because he has a certain disinterest in it. I've put forward the argument that without Torishima's suggestions and feedback, Dragon Ball would be unrecognisable and probably nowhere near as great. Without him we'd have: Goku looking like a chibi Sun Wukong, no Kuririn, no Tenkaichi Budokai, no Piccolo, etc. Toriyama certainly deserves the lion's share of credit for taking these ideas and making something of them with his unique creative signature, but it was never a one-man-show and rarely ever is with anything else. Maybe Toriyama would've always been the GOAT -- his later standalone works like
Kintoki and
Jaco are superb -- but who's to say he would've developed as an artist and storyteller in the same way? Nails in the road and all that.
With the revival, the last time Toriyama really came to assert dominance was with
Battle of Gods. He's written longer screenplays since then, but they've either been A) somewhat creatively bankrupt to be as charitable as possible, i.e.
Resurrection 'F', or B) once again heavily influenced by his editors and others' contributions to the franchise, i.e.
Super: Broly. He's still an active force with the Super manga, but he was so hands-off with the anime that I can't blame Toei's staff for taking heavy liberties in places. The Tournament of Power was an insanely ambitious premise but he only gave them the barest minimum outline and about twelve new character designs (out of nearly
a hundred) and didn't even explain basic stuff like Jiren's personality.
Re: the Power of Friendship stuff. I don't think Goku's speech would be bad in isolation, but the anime had been hamfistedly shoving that particular theme down our throats constantly since the Zamasu arc and never really stopped. So by that point, it felt less cathartic than they probably intended. That said, I don't mind that they gave Goku a loose arc of sorts, where he starts off as his exaggerated dumbass hick self and gradually evolves into a more serious and responsible 'Toei-fied' version of himself as he begins to understand the stakes. May not be anything Toriyama would've done but it was enjoyable.
And the way he writes DB isn't the only way DB can be written.