This story line was developed out of an earlier iteration.
In the first version, the derelect is destroyed and the ship heads home. Along the way, there is a distress call from another company owned colony. The ship automatically wakes Ripley and Bishop and they go to answer. Once there, they wake Hicks and fix him enough for action. Bishop is also repaired well enough to help. If Newt's appearance was too different, she could be left in stasis.
They take on refugees and go down in the dropship to save more and get stuck on the surface. Once there, they learn that the company has obtained eggs from the derelect and it has spun out of control. The usual festivities, and it comes to the climax.
Earlier, shortly after getting stranded, they come across an atmospheric processor. They express concern that it could blow and are told that it is a different type and that nothing that could detonate atomically is allowed on the planet because of the composition of the atmosphere. Hopefully, this little exchange passes by quickly as just concern about being caught in another meltdown. Hopefully everyone has forgotten about the destruction of the derelect at the start.
All the settlers are evacuated as confirmed by their personal locators. Ripley gets desperate at the climax and manages to launch a nuke while in the weapons bay of the Sulaco (possibly while an alien is crawling on it;) and the entire company owned planet goes up in flames.
ALIEN featured the destruction of the company ship then blowing the creature into space. In ALIENS, the destruction of the company processor and then blowing the queen into space. A3, as the culmination, would have to top that and cause the company more spectacular damage. They owned entire planets. I remembered the concerns of the early '40s.
There is the ALIEN style and the ALIENS style. This first version of the iteration in ALIEN style would have had Hicks or Bishop and probably both dying. I gave much more attention to ALIENS style.
More and more it started to seem like the 18 year old Newt thing was the way to go. ALIEN style seemed more and more workable, but I still prefered ALIENS style. I gave very passing consideration to other crewmembers.
By the time A:RES came, I moved to ALIEN style and finally settled on the storyline. It featured 18Newt and taking the Sulaco deep. Hicks would sacrifice himself for Newt and maybe a friend, Ripely would sacrifice herself to stop the company from taking the aliens offworld and Newt would return to Sulaco and blow the planet.
That done, I went back to ALIENS style to see whether I could do better.
I still lean towards ALIEN style, but I might not be thinking like a movie marketer ;)