DT or Chemistry for A level to do engineering in uni?

Have a friend who’s got an offer from Imperial for Design Engineering with Maths DT Phys and Computer science.
Have four friends interested in Mech Engineering who took Maths Furthet Maths Phys and Chem. they all want to drop chem.
Basically, I’ve found unless you want to go into a chemical engineering route, you’re putting yourself through the hardest a level for nothing.
My friends who take dt regardless or wanting to do engineering or not have had many more opportunities and won so many engineering related awards.
So I’d recommend dt as you’d have more chance for supercurriculars with it. Plus it’s less content heavy than chem.
For refernce I take chem maths further maths and bio, wanting to do med. Chem is an a level you need to dedicate a lot of time too, so is further maths in my opinion.

So I usually get 8-9s in all of my subjects for GCSE and I expect the same for my actual results which I will get in August, having finished my GCSEs a few weeks ago so I will be fine doing whatever a-levels I want to in sixth form. I plan to do maths, further maths and physics for a-level but at my school they expect us to do a 4th subject so I am deciding between DT and Chemistry. I am looking to do mechanical engineering at uni or another type of engineering I heard of called design engineering I think. I was wondering whether DT or chemistry would help me more to do as my 4th a-level. The issue with DT though is that the exam board is AQA and I absolutely hate AQA DT mark schemes as I did AQA DT gcse and found it impossible to mark my own papers accurately as the mark schemes are extremely vague, which is the same for the a-level markschemes. I guess the problem with chemistry would be that I might find it quite difficult compared to aqa DT where the content of gcse and a-level are mostly similar, just more detail at a-level. Also if anyone may be able to explain what this design engineering degree would involve if I were to choose it over mecheng that would be great. Any suggestions are appreciated thank you.