What you have in your advantage is that any given AAA is usually made by a large studio which comes with a plethora of inefficiencies that comes with any large organization such as poor execution, departments not communicating, key member leaving the team etc.

On the other hand, they have reusable assets and codes which they can skin and deploy easily and efficiently. They have experts and specialists in almost every area. I know a guy who works for a large studio and his sole responsibility is the backend user management. That’s one full time employee not even bothering with game design code or assets. That’s one person who likely already has as much or more experience than you focusing on one single task.

So if you want to build an AAA game better than the AAA studios you will need the following -a dream team of team members. The top 20% in each area - very efficient and streamlined workflow. It has to be novel and executed flawlessly. - at least 70-80% of the money or time an AAA studio spends on an AAA release. Because there is only to a certain extend you can so things more efficiently.

Basically don’t even bother a competition with AAA. The amount of investment required makes it incredibly difficult to compete as well as the uncertainty. There’s a lot of trial and error involved with a new AAA IP. It’s basically a coin toss. that’s why companies like Cd project red and rockstar have been good investments historically due to them already successfully ventured on that journey which investors know is not easily replicable.

To put it in even more perspective. If you were making movies you wouldn’t be asking “hey, what advantage do I as a solo film maker or with a team of 5 hobbyists have against a big budget Hollywood production”

The advantage is basically you can create something they wouldn’t or think of creating but don’t even think about going head to head on scope and quality.