“to get in ED unhooked at a tippy top school you do need to be cream of the crop,”
No you do not, at least for STEM. The cream of the crop for stem are applying to EA or SCEA colleges, it’s the next set of applicants that apply ED. If you’re one of the best stem students in the country, you’ll apply to MIT or Cal Tech EA, or Stanford, Harvard SCEA, Michigan (or state flagship) EA, Berkeley RD. As long as those colleges are not ED, the best, cream, whatever you want to call them are not applying ED anywhere.
As for non-stem, I think it’s similar as well, but here, there are programs that are some of the best and ED, maybe Econ at Chicago, journalism at Northwestern or Columbia. English, Literature - well that’s pretty much Yale and Harvard, again, SCEA.