Can someone explain how power cords help if...

Hi Sean. I too find AA difficult...as well unnavigable at best. Just wanted to chime in with my firmly-held belief that very-low dielectric involvement insulation (DISCLAIMER: like the Teflons used in my DIY PC Kits) is in most instances more important than huge amonts of copper, except of course in kilowatt monos.
Indeed power supply design is always the overriding factor. Yet even in (supposedly) highly-sophisticated supplies one can hear improvements in upper octaves transparency and staging depth when changing to a PC with superior insulation. Air and/or Teflon are simply better than cheap plastics/rubber/cotton, etc. By this statement I do NOT mean to condone the current over-spending for PCs, as you probably know, as PCs of the best materials should still be VERY affordable, after all.

Yes, connectIONS are important, but connector cost is often NOT correllated with performance! I use an affordable all-black Leviton AC male, for example, that outperforms its, and other, 5266's simply by the ABSENCE of the unnecessary cheap-dielectric wire guides that as well only use ONE SIDE of each T-shaped screw-clamp. In a multiwire/conductor cable (like star-quad or more), being able to evenly distribute the mechanical load symmetrically across the two sides of a T-shaped screw-clamp is a great advantage. And of course air is a better insulator than the $$ plug's nylon "guide". Since the brass contacts are identical, it's a winner. Similarly some folks spend too much on fancier-sounding IECs than necessary. The fairly-new affordable Schurter with all-brass screw-clamp terminal "beds" is a clear winner...especially if you slightly bend its readily-accessible spade-leaves toward parallel for more surface area of contact. (Don't do this to the ground, though, as you'll lose too much stiction with a loose component IEC female.) Nothing like hardwiring, guys....