In my kids’ school, regular classes are definitely boring and unchallenging. My D deliberately chose to take all Honors and AP courses to avoid being in the regular classes. I her opinion, the “dumb” kids take regular classes because they don’t want to work.
My S, though, is dyslexic and dysgraphic. He takes regular English, the rest Honors. He is definitely not dumb, and I have had to disabuse my D of this idea. He felt that he had a challenging course load as a freshman without struggling to do well in his least favorite course. Honors classes in our school are definitly more rigorous, and in fact, I think in some cases are more difficult than AP classes.
I have to say though, the regular classes do seem very very easy. My son has hardly any work in his English class.
I will encourage him to do as many APs as he is interested in, because he will probably always have a gap as far as English classes go. I don’t think 12 is necessarily more impressive than a kid who does 7 and is able to show his or her interest in the subjects taken by reinforcing it in the college application. In our HS, only a very few kids can take AP bio as sophomores. Everyone else has to wait until they are juniors for APs, so it is VERY difficult to do more than 8 APs, and I have never heard of a kid do so.