There are around 3500 national AP scholars at the end of 11th grade who will be applying to colleges - lot fewer than 16000 national merit semi finalists (26,000 is not relevant since what you have earned after 12th does not mean much for the admissions process)
Whether a specific college cares about a specific honor or not means nothing during the admission process since the honor belongs to the kid and they are only able to name 5 of them on commonapp and this is up there with any academic honor one wants to name. Unless common app has a list of specific honors the student is allowed to name vs not, it is a moot point what one is allowed to list for their honors.
One can omit low scores and so adcoms are not going to sit around trying to figure out if you reached the average by omitting a couple of 1s while getting 8 4s etc.
On a side note, i have noticed that despite what the colleges claim they value or don’t, both Stanford and MIT seem to value academics a lot more in their application process.