Well, without any idea of what the goal is, no proper recommendations as to what to change from the start can be made. In and of itself, a default AIX install will run indefinately (again barring dpid2.log). Tell us what's going to run on it, and we can make better suggestions as to how to change the defaults.
For me, yes I usually bump up the size of /tmp, and the default paging space. I wouldn't do that if it was not called for.
I'm not sure what you mean by cramming 2-3G onto an 18G disk. Granted there's plenty of space to expand them if necessary, but in my own work, I prefer not to expand just because I can.
The only real issue, at least to me, is /home, and I've been known to move that into a data vg if it's going to end up containing data.