but the examples you gave seem to me to be more similar to compulsions than to utility functions

I would have liked to use examples of plugging in clearly terminal values to a general goal achieving system. But the only current or historical general goal achieving systems are humans, and it is notoriously difficult to figure out what humans' terminal values are.

My model of davidad's view is that part of general intelligence, as opposed to narrow intelligence, is varied and complex goals. We could make a narrow AI which only cared about the number of paperclips in the universe, but in order to make an intelligence that's general we need to make it also care about the future, planning, existential risk, and so on.

I am not claiming that you could give an AGI an arbitrary goal system that suppresses the "Basic AI Drives", but that those drives will be effective instrumental values, not lost purposes, and while a paperclip maximizing AGI will have sub goals such as controlling resources and improving its ability to predict the future, the achievement of those goals will help it to actually produce paperclips.