My take on this is that dual enrollment allows you to be introduced to a college setting. No more are the days of having a numerical average, teachers being lenient on lateness; everything is college level and the way college teaches it is how dual enrollment courses are. Colleges favor AP because it’s a nationally known intro-college program and have their own way of seeing what AP scores will receive credit or not. With dual enrollment it depends on the class, college, and syllabus.
AP courses are also weighted with a 1.1 curve ( could be different for other schools, but I’m based in NYC) and that weight would increase your GPA and ranking.
With admissions and increasing chance, take courses general education courses. Your typical Science, math, social studies, English. Courses like Biology, physics, calculus would help a lot especially when your HS doesn’t offer those courses.
One more thing, for dual enrollment you get credit on a passing average. It’s not like AP where it all depends on one exam to determine your faith. If your school doesn’t offer particular APs you are interested in, but there are DE courses for them, they would be your best bet in getting introduced to the topic you enjoy.
A DE program that I recommend, is called Outlier.org. They offer DE courses for $400 per course, in a remote setting and they have a college agreement with Uni of Pittsburgh. I’ve taken Calculus with them and I do say it’s very interesting on how they view mathematics in real world situations.