Sup, Steve.
I do feel that you trivialise the Alien a lot of the time, and at the end of the day the narrative potential of the species suffers because of it. In ALIENS, we witnessed them consciously taking out the main power to at least the Operations complex and avoiding weapons fire through the use of their own hive structures and the human-built colony itself, while in ALIEN: Resurrection, they could grasp basic technology. These are creatures that are, except in the case of Acheron, just a few hours old.
A human can't grasp technology at a few hours and certainly can't understand the technical requirements of a Weyland-Yutani installation at a few weeks of age.
You're not the sole perpetrator of the Aliens-as-fodder viewpoint, but given that you have had and still have a major role in shaping the stories that occur within the franchise, it's disappointing that you shoehorn Aliens, of all creatures, into the cannon fodder role.
While you clearly don't agree, I find that treatment of the Aliens as a waste of excellent visual design and creature concepts, and they begin to lose their luster when the creatures are often dealt with very easily. It removes tension from the role of the Alien, and the stories become less Aliens vs. Predator and more Humans Deal With Predators And Maybe Some Aliens Cause Mischief.
It's like this Predator level in the second Aliens vs. Predator game; you jump out of a split in the ground and before you is a steep hill. It's a fair distance away and creates a neat firing lane. Prepare for one of the most boring moments in the Predator campaign as Aliens attack you in small groups while you whip out the plasma caster and shoot them down as they mindlessly rush towards you.
The Alien vs. Predator movie had its faults, but one of its strong-points was displaying the battles between Aliens and Predators in a more balanced light. There, the Aliens didn't just announce themselves and allow themselves to become targets, but actually acted as per the original movies, using the shadows to their advantage and waiting until their prey was focused elsewhere. The best example of this was in the Celtic vs. Grid fight, after Celtic cut Grid's tail. Grid, being quite clever and quite above German Shepherd intelligence, used his own blood to damage Celtic's armour and bought time for a sneak attack that ultimately led to the battle ending in Grid's favour.
If the concept behind Aliens vs. Predator is Predators engaging in combat with a species that has the capacity to hunt them back, I find it counter-intuitive to display Alien intelligence as that of a German Shepherd, especially when evidence to the contrary is in the movies themselves. The tension comes on which you give the Predators opponents that well and truly surpass them in some ways, and the way Aliens are often written doesn't allow for that. I'm not saying that Aliens have intelligence that surpasses a Predator, but the movies and the commentaries behind them make it clear that they're supposed to be far above non-human entities. Hell, the original concept was that the Alien didn't use technology since its physical perfection outgrew the need for peripherals like weapons and vehicles.
The bottom line with Predators is that they're insanely close to human. It's easy to root for them and even sympathise or empathise with them. Aliens are a different story altogether, being of a psychology not comparable to human or Predator. They make excellent villains because there's no humanity to them - just perfect adaption to the role of survival and killing anything that gets in the way of that. Every Alien should be considered a powerful threat the same way an individual Predator is, because despite its weakness to powerful enough ranged weapons, it's not going to reveal itself. Aliens are far more patient than either humans or Predators, caring only for survival, not the hunt or any human needs.
I'm not saying that Aliens should be dominant without question, but I am saying that their weakness as displayed in your writings (among the works of others) removes a lot of what originally made the Alien an effective monster.
EDIT:
In the commentary of the Director's Cut of ALIENS (1:48:23, to be precise), Cameron addresses the cleverness and intelligence of Aliens directly - this is essentially the word of God unless Scott wants to contradict him:
"Now this is a distinction - I never actually got a sense in the first film that the Alien actually had an intelligence that allowed it to manipulate their technology, but I didn't see that necessarily as a barrier here, because certainly these creatures have been around long, you know. You have to remember, the Alien in the first film had only been alive for twenty-four hours, it was still an infant even though it had grown full size.
These Aliens have had weeks or months to figure things out. There's no reason they couldn't figure out how the electrical system worked and that sort of thing. I'm not saying they're technological, but there's rudimentary stuff. So the implication here is that they're actually pretty clever. And I think it's clear by the end of the film that the Alien Queen knows how to operate an elevator, if nothing else."
So, there you have it, really. The most influential source material of Aliens vs. Predator in terms of the Alien creature, even more so than the original film, directly means to imply that the Aliens are "pretty clever". Not just the Queen, either, but your basic Alien warriors. Even if it were just the Queen, she can clearly communicate to other Aliens and there's no reason to believe that they'd magically forget what she's taught them, especially given that the whole point of the Alien's psychology is to be unknowable.
