I’m a little surprised that certain basic things have not been mentioned so far in this thread, perhaps they are obvious but let me repeat them, just for the record:
- many schools, especially state schools, will allow you to skip some classes if you have APs with a score of 4 or 5, and that could lead to saving of money and time needed to graduate
- Stanford doesn’t want to accept robots racing for the highest number of APs so they put out a very commonsensical statement about that; but all top colleges, in one form or another, also state that they consider the most demanding curriculum choices in their admission decisions; if your school offers some non-APs that are the most rigorous, that would certainly diminish the importance of APs for you but for most HS students, APs represent the highest level of available classes = the rigor the colleges are looking for.