Blackbeard's Devil Fruit shuts off his elemental intangibility but it doesn't weaken Ace to the point where he should be easily beaten by Blackbeard.
He turns off their abilities so they have to think of a completely different way of fighting, then he can punch him in weak places and such.
You seem to be forgetting that Ace hurt him with every technique he landed, drawing blood and giving burns with every attack.
Ace lost because of the devil fruit he had. He did not lose because of an AP advantage.
Which is why he said
"Nothing stands a chance in front of the darkness".
Also, it's kinda pissing me off that we're using the guy who gave a cautious Shanks a scar as an antifeat. The same guy who Ace said was strong enough to be a commander
without a devil fruit is the guy we're using as an antifeat. It's kinda annoying.
Why can't Akainu have Devil Fruit superiority and be stronger than Ace?
Because that hasn't been proven by a single person here.
Akainu beat him and he said "
my fruit is superior to yours". He didn't say "I'm stronger than you
and my fruit is superior to yours. so you just have 0 chance at all to beat me", he just said "
you're fire? Ha, I'm magma which burns fire, my fruit is superior to yours" which explains why they clashed and matched each other for a short period of time before Ace was overpowered via DF advantage.
Nothing proves Akainu was stronger or had more AP, especially when Oda said "superior abilities ≠ stronger".
Oda only portrayed one elemental
advantage the entire show and that was the Magu2 and the Mera2,
then he says that it doesn't mean that they're stronger? And shouldn't Ace be comparable to his peers too? That's not an argument.
We've been doing this
exact same scaling for at least a year+, but since Ace is going to a higher tier, the world wants to shut down.
I think it's a fair example. Aokiji's and Ace's Devil Fruit seems like a case of mutual cancellation, like Ace's and Smoker's. This would also explain why the duel between Akainu and Aokiji would take a whole seven days outside of them just having insane durability/endurance, if their Devil Fruits were also near-perfect counters for each other.
Smoker's attack's don't have AP. Aokiji's do.
Your point was that "He didn't want to fight Smoker because their powers cancelled out". He
wanted to fight Aokiji. Aokiji wouldn't have
ran up on Ace if he knew that their abilities cancelled out.
And Akainu and Aokiji were stated to be equals in strength and they fought for too long because their strength was equal, not because their DFs cancelled each other out.
Plus, Akainu melted Aokiji's ice and his magma was still there consistently during the war, it's not because of counteracting abilities.
That's a dangerous logic to work by. I can already see countless other charactes being boosted up by the logic of "Well, this other character on the crew / in the group is 20,000x higher than them, and it doesn't make sense that they'd be so high, so the others should be higher too."
That's fair.