How did Dragon Ball's editors change the story during the Android and Cell sagas?

The Android saga was designed to end with two villains: Android 19, the pale mime faced heavy, and Android 20, who is Dr. Gero himself. Akira Toriyama has retold what happened next in interviews, and the telling is consistent. His former editor Kazuhiko Torishima, by then no longer on the series, contacted him with a review: the new villains looked like a geezer and a China doll. Toriyama, stung and agreeing, built replacements at speed: Androids 17 and 18, the cool, dangerous twins who dismantled the cast and took over the arc, demoting 19 and 20 to an opening act that Gero does not survive.

Then it happened again, in the same arc, from the same direction. Torishima's verdict on the new villain Cell, in his insectoid first form, was that he was just a bug monster: ugly, and not frightening in the right way. Toriyama responded by designing Cell's transformations, the mechanism the whole saga now runs on, so the bug could become something sleeker. The second transformation drew its own review from the sitting editorial side: Semi-Perfect Cell was dismissed as looking like a moron, and Toriyama hurried the story to the final form, Perfect Cell, the elegant duelist who hosts the Cell Games. In other words, the most famous transformation ladder in manga exists because two successive Cell designs were insulted by editors.

Toriyama has always told these stories on himself, with the air of a man who knows the insults were right. The pattern is the point: Dragon Ball's villains were not unveiled from a master plan, they were workshopped in public, by phone, mid serialization, by an ex editor whose taste the author trusted enough to obey even when he no longer had to. The Android and Cell sagas read as escalation by design. They were escalation by criticism, absorbed weekly, in ink.