You should do whatever works for you, but I wouldn’t diss APs :-).
The school my son went to wanted to eliminate APs as has become fashionable at private schools these days :-). He went and met his old teachers when visiting home from college and talked them out of it. He said it is so comfortable to place out of courses at his college with APs than it is with DEs, IB or testing out. Basically if you had IB or DEs you have to test out, and he said it is non-trivially hard. I think in the entire batch the one guy who managed to test out of freshman physics was an IPho silver medalist. My son comfortably placed out freshman physics because he had 5s on AP Mech C and AP E&M C. In fact he winged his AP Mech exam his junior year in HS with no prep and got a 4. He found out his college lets him place out of all Phy and Chem if he had 5s on all the respective APs, so in the senior year of high school he made it a point to re-register for AP Mech, prepped for a week, so that he could get a clean 5. After that, he had no freshman requirements in college apart from a writing sem. This left an open palette in picking courses the first year. He could have graduated in 3 years if he wanted.
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