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This post is divided in 2 parts, one talking about the plot structure (or lack of plot structure of the 80s series), the second part is about the importance of the 80s titles
Part 1 plot structure of 80s manga
Out of all the important series in the 80s made by JUMP I can only say that only Captain Tsubasa (Becoming the best soccer player in the world), Ginga Nagareboshi Gin (Beating the bad bear guy) & Dai No Daiboken (Beating the Demon King) had clear goals, every other title from Dragon Ball to Hokuto No Ken... Didn't really have 'goals', I guess you could say Dragon Ball's characters' goal at first was finding the Dragon Balls, but then...? Sure, Goku's 'goal' was becoming the best fighter in the world, but I can't remember him ever stating that goal (Like say Naruto or Luffy clearly state their goal).
Heck, Saint Seiya's main character (Seiya, obviously) had the goal to find his long lost sister... That goal was mentioned in chapter 1 or 2 IIRC and it was never mentioned again (Until supeeeeeeeeeer later into the series, and it was an asspull the author made so he could connect some story plots...)
Even Kinnikuman (Though it's a series from the last part of the 70s), one of Jump biggest sellers was fighting Godzilla (Or some Kaijus) in its first chapters, the anime rushed thru that arc so they could get to the better parts of the manga.
But that can be said of any era, for example Yu Yu Hakusho at first seemed like Togashi maybe wanted to make a slice of life-ish story about a vandal that needed to see his bad ways, the first couple of chapters (18 chapters, or 3 volumes) were all about Yusuke's non-fighting ordeals, the manga didn't even have any fights at first (According to my memory) this was fast forwarded in the anime so they could get to the action parts too..
I mean it's not like a series need a super clear-cut goal like "Becoming the pirate king", what was the goal of Rurouni Kenshin? Or BLEACH? (Sure later it was to rescue the damsel in distress in turn, but before that, at the very begining??)
Part 2 the importance of 80s Jump
Also, I don't think we need to discuss this but the most influential era of Jump is and will forever be the 80s, there's a reason why the golden era of Jump started then (So the manga that paved the road to Jump's golden era started in the 80s), and while perhaps it was the golden trio of Yu Yu Hakusho, Slam Dunk and Dragon Ball that were being published when Jump reached its highest circulation of 6.5 million.
I said this era is the most influential simply due to the fact that it was in this era that different Jump titles started being broadcasted worldwide making millions of fans anime/manga fans, titles like Saint Seiya, Captain Tsubasa and Dragon Ball were practically religions in lots of countries during the late 80s, mid 90s, for some reason anglo-speaking countries never really got to see these anime (Only Dragon Ball, and loooong after most of the world had experienced Goku's adventure.)
I will tell you the reason why anglo-speaking countries never got to see these generational defining anime properties (And I'm not exagerating at all, if you ask here in Mexico any person my age,30, (or say -5/+5 years) who Seiya, Oliver Atom (Tsubaza Osora) or Goku are they will know.)...
Anyway the reason was because European countries wanted cheap cartoons for their programing blocks and Japanese licensors were selling the broadcasting rights to series like Dragon Ball for "dirt cheap", (that was in the late 80s/early 90s btw in Europe) and later in say the early 90s/mid 90s Mexico and other latin american countries got to see the animes that had been popular in Europe 5 years prior (Basically Captain Tsubasa, Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya)
One Piece can be the best selling manga of all time, and sure Naruto's mid 2000 to mid 2010s popularity was super high, but I don't see it ever being close to the level of Saint Seiya or Dragon Ball level of popularity worldwide (Sans english speaking countries) because those titles were just in another level, they reached Simpson-mania like popularity. (This is coming from someone that LOVES both One Piece and Naruto, and I actually prefer them to Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya)
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Omake
Here's an extra funny story, just because lol. This is from a documentary called Songokumania (Only available in Spanish, I think) which mainly talks about how Dragon Ball conquered Spain.
First You have to understand the way that television channels around Europe saw this, Dragon Ball was basically filler programming, like say Tom & Jerry or stuff like that, episodic cartoons basically.
So the thing is is that first Dr.Slump was run (Toriyama's first hit before Dragon Bal, I guess they had like a deal with Toei or something) but then there were Dr.Slump re-runs which was fine since Dr.Slump is an episodic series (Like The simpsons for example)... But then Dragon Ball was broadcasted in Catalunia and it ran for like 26 episodes, and then it stopped and returned to episode 1 and every damn kid in Catalunia was calling the station begging for them to continue the story, the guys in the channel couldn't understand what the kids were talking about, it kinda seems like they didn't even know they had bought an actual "cartoon" with a continuing story (As in not episodic) ...
So 26 episodes is more or less a "season" of what would be considered normal, right? The thing is they stopped at the worst possible point! The Goku vs Jackie Chun fight, that's why they probably received so many calls lol.
The manager of the channel's programing (Oleguer Sarsanedas) had a kid and his kid told him how great this series was and Oleguer was like calm your tits kid, but he borrowed some copies of the first Dragon Ball episodes, started watching them and totally saw why kids were falling in love with this series,
He said in an interview that at first he had thought Dragon Ball's full run was 26 episodes when in fact it was over a 150..
This is kinda interesting to me because, well Dragon Ball must have been hugely popular in Japan at the time (I guess during 1990-1991) so Idk it just seems interesting that Toei (Or whoever licensed Dragon Ball to them) didn't mention something like "oh yeah this is the most popular show in Japan and it's got 150 episodes".
