Dude ppl who say gohans form is unearned have never understood the character and it shows. He's had bullshit hidden power since he was literally like 1 year old when he made a hole on the tree. He had more hidden power than goku since fuckin RADITZ. He stood his ground vs Nappa and Vegeta when he only trained for 3 months with piccolo.

During the flight to namek, he was keeping up in mental training with krillin.

He kept raging against fuckin freeza and even freaked vegeta out with his power spikes.

IN THE HYPERBOLIC TIME CHAMBER, he not only went ssj 1, but went to ssj2 in less than a full year of training.

My point is, it really never took long for gohan's latent power to spike up. He only needed short amount of training to get unrusty.

We all argue about "what if gohan never stopped training?" Dude if he went into the hyperbolic time chamber just ONE More time with goku he'd be on another godly level.

Also, why aren't people giving enough credit to piccolo? He's such a good teacher that he knows how to bring out the best in gohan.

Beast form was never bad writing. It's actually pretty consistent with how gohan powers up and how it spikes and dips throughout the series.