Mosfet with capacitor across the load?
Keep your gate pull down ,Your complimentary follower is better than totem pole for what you are doing .The capacitor will do more harm than good the way you are setting things up .Place a resistor in series with the cap so you can reduce Q and hence ringing like what your friend wanted .The resistor also limits charging current at mosfet turnon .I saw somebody do this in 1992 on a job that drove a PCB car windscreen motor which was dealing with voltages and currents in your ballpark .He made the big mistake of using a slug diode for D1 and got bad waveforms which he "cured "with a 1 microfarad 63V film cap across the diode .The result that I inherited was molten caps !