Go back to the beginning. The first Aliens movie was essentially a haunted-house-in-space. It only worked because of what we in the biz call an idiot-plot -- that is, everybody in the movie has to be an idiot. This is right out of those old Universal monster films from the late thirties and early forties in which people do really stupid stuff and the monster gets 'em. And it serves them right.
If you were on that space-truck and there was a nine-foot-tall-monster eating the crew, would *you* go to the bathroom by yourself? Crawl into an air duct hunting it? You would? Then you deserve to die, 'cause them ain't survival characteristics where I come from. I needed to go pee, we would *all* go pee. Nobody leaves the pack until the thing is for sure dead. We'd all sit with our backs to the wall armed to the teeth and if anything moved, we'd barbecue it. It wanted one of us, it would have to take us all.
Anybody here disagree?
There was no backstory to the Aliens. There were the eggs, the dead alien transporting them, then the face-huggers and finally the drone. No more backstory was needed. The alien was designed soley for its look, not its function, and it showed.
Nowhere in that movie did the critter evidence any IQ higher than a dog.
The second movie, which was essentially a Heinlein bug-hunt, the Queen showed intelligence, but I didn't see any from the drones. Smart animals don't throw themselves at armed men in waves, they come up with a better way than dying en masse.
Only place you are sure the Queen is thinking is when she is looking at the elevator after Ripley. So give it to the Queen, but the drones? Never saw 'em do anything a trained bear couldn't do.
A3 and A4? I'd just wish them into the cornfield, because neither one of them worked for me on any level.
The first Predator movie didn't establish any backstory, either.
So it was up to the writers of the graphic novels and the books to come up with something, because you need more to fill out a novel than you do a movie.
So you have Aliens, who, save for the Queens, are ot-nay ooh-tay ight-bray. Nasty critters, but dangerous in the way that tigers are dangerous, no more.
Then you have the Predators, a species farther along the path than humans, given that when we first see them, they have FTL travel and better sidearms, and who could, if they found it, nuke the Alien planet from space without the Aliens even knowing about it -- if there was an Alien homeworld and they weren't genetically-enhanced lab rats.
So the who-wins argument is moot. Yeah, a man going barehanded against a Kodiak bear is in deep dung; give him a high-powered rifle or even a handgun, the bear is toast.
You gotta go with the toolmaker. Sooner or later, they will rule.
While folks might have liked to see the Aliens with a little more on the intellectual ball, they never had anything, in the movies or the books. They might not be run-into-the-wall stupid, but they can't run with humans or Predators. It just isn't there.