Do not confuse things here. The ranking of all the AEJs remains a matter of great dispute and is its own issue. However, while of course a lot of journals are roughly equivalent, as a general rule it is completely silly to submit first to a clearly lower ranked journal than to a higher ranked one you think you might have a chance at getting your paper accepted in.
Period.
In general I agree. But very occasionally you'll get referee reports that say, "This is a REALLY great paper, except there's this one fundamental flaw. I wish the author had done XXXX."
And you knew about the fundamental flaw but you hadn't thought of the clever way around it. So you try it, and it works, and all of a sudden your paper no longer has that flaw.
That's what happened with my JLEO->JPE paper. It went AER->ReStat->JLEO->JPE. Referees kept mentioning that there was one big flaw, and I flailed at it. Then based off of one really good JLEO referee, I was able to overcome the flaw. I wish the person would out himself so I could thank him. It's my best pub......