Are Humans in the Dragon Ball Universe weak in term of hidden potential?

[Silver7]

Goku started out with a power level of 10 and he trained hard just to reach a power level of 416 which is still weak by Dragon Ball Z standards. He trained in 100x gravity to become one of the strongest fighters in the universe. So if Krillin or Yamcha trained for four years in 100x gravity then don't you think their results would show that Humans aren't to be taken lightly?

[ori-taggart]

There was a fan manga made called "Dragon Ball: That time I got reincarnated as Yamcha" (I say fan manga, but it was published in Shonen Jump+ and it's considered canon from what I saw).

I think it could answer the question partially, for it's a fan of dragon ball that dies and reincarnates as Yamcha and uses his knowledge of the plot to become much stronger. He does overcome a lot of the shortcomings by just knowing what happens in DB to be fair, but it does add to your point that if the human trained the same way goku did, they would be a lot stronger.

[oshirockingham]

Short answer, yes. There are no such things as Superhuman 2 transformation, Superhuman 3, or something like that. Even the human-Saiyan hybrids have a limit on their peak Super Saiyan transformation level compared to pure-blooded Saiyans, even though at first they can appear to be stronger and achieve level 2 transformation quicker because humans have more intense emotions compared to Saiyans.

[NickRowler]

I think Akira Toriyama just made stuff up as he went along.

Goku was originally just a human with a monkey tail. But later on, the alien stuff was added in, and the Saiyans became super powered compared to the human characters.

I would argue that humans were pretty strong early on in the series but overtime they sort of got overpowered by the non-human characters.

[KevinReijnders]

Oh yeah he absolutely just made shit up haha.
Power levels don't mean anything in Dragon Ball, I mean in the Frieza saga Saiyans just got stronger by being defeated. Shit makes zero sense