I agree that HRC is a good tool for looking at this kind of spot. It’s been a little while since I’ve used it, but I think the 10BB threshold is a setting that you can change? It’s certainly capable of looking at deeper/more complex situations if you build them yourself. Of course, it’s more time- and resource-intensive (it would probably take an hour or more for it to analyze every hand you were dealt in a 300-hand history if it had to consider every hand where you had 40BB or fewer). 

But yeah, OP, you are on the right track but you left out a critical detail from your original question: position. The only reason anyone plays any hand other than Aces is that there is money in the pot pre-flop. The fewer people there are still to act behind me, the more hands I can profitably open raise.

Once someone raises in front of me, I have a new dilemma: there is more money in the pot, but there is also someone who is claiming to have a strong hand. However, I know that he also has some incentive to raise even without the nuts, which is why I probably don’t have to have the nuts to re-raise him.

When you have a hand that you believe to be ahead of the original raiser’s opening range, you have to make a decision: do I call, 3-bet, or even fold? You need to estimate the expected value of each and choose the option with the highest EV. When considering a 3-bet, this basically means answering four questions:

1. How often will my opponent fold, and how much do I have to gain from those folds? Hands like AK and JJ benefit more from fold equity than KK or AA do, even though you may not be raising them “as a bluff” (in other words, you may also expect to be ahead of a calling or even 4-betting range).

2. How often will my opponent call, and what can I expect that call to be worth? This is a function of your equity vs a likely calling range as well as how well your hand will play after the flop (if your 3-bet is not all in).

3. How often will my opponent 4-bet, and how will I fare against a 4-betting range? Especially when a 4-bet isn’t likely, it’s OK to 3-bet a hand for value even though you will fold to a 4-bet.

4. How does the EV of calling compare to the EV of 3-betting (which is determined by the above three questions)?

We don’t need to inquire about the EV of folding, as it’s always 0. So generally, if calling or 3-betting has positive EV, we can rule out folding, though of course there are tournament situations where cEV and $EV deviate significantly.

Of course in many cases you don’t know exactly how your opponent will respond and so can’t put exact numbers on these things. However, you should recognize that there’s a relationship between them. If you opponent opens from the CO and you have AK on the button, you are probably far enough ahead of his opening range that he will either fold very often or call/4-bet a range that AK is well ahead of. Either way, you win. The one thing that can’t happen is for your opponent to rarely fold and also reliably have AK smoked. It’s hard to get dealt a hand that strong, especially when an A and a K are accounted for, and your opponent has incentive to raise a wide enough range from the CO.

It is possible that your opponent doesn’t properly understand or respond to his incentive to attack the blinds and is a huge nit when it comes to raising the CO. If you knew that, you might prefer not to 3-bet him with AK.

However, this doesn’t mean that his nitty strategy is exploiting you. For one thing, the mere fact that he is raising suggests he is not a nit (nits raise less often than other players). But even if he is, you are passively benefiting from many situations where you would have had to fold your button if he’d raised his CO, but because he made overly tight folds from the CO, you got to make a +EV raise on your button. Basically, all those folding mistakes he makes from the CO overwhelm whatever he gains by getting lucky enough to “trap” you when he has AA in the CO and you have AK on the button.