I had to persuade my older son to take APUSH in high school. I pointed out that if he did well on the exam, there was a good chance he’d get out of a history course in college. It was a fair amount of work, but he got a 5 on the test and did indeed get credit for it. OTOH I did let him not take AP English classes and he was accepted by Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. (But not by Caltech, Stanford or MIT.) I think APUSH is one of the better APs out there - it’s pretty clear to me that the average American has very little knowledge of American history.
I don’t think the AP science courses are more difficult, but they usually require more class time because of the labs. That often means it’s hard to schedule more than one a year, depending on how your high school is organized.