Yes. Edges really aren't important.
> What it is is
>a high AP stake. When you're w3, you can easily make a 50 point bid.
>And win with it.
>
>> Even if ranks cancel each other out,you can still attack and be successful.
>
>Ranks almost always cancel out, which is why they aren't important.
>Don't worry about them.
>
>The only time I'd consider using ranks is for something inherently
>large and powerful. A club swung by a great troll is going to do more
>damage than one swung by a human -- and the difference is almost
>always going to be a part of the story.
Ranks are (as David alludes to) basically designed so that you can use them when you wish weapons and armour to be important, and completely ignore them when they aren't. For the majority of combats, you can safely assume that everyone has weapons and armour that are equivalent, and ignore them, if that's what you want to do.
Now, if your heroes are ambushed in the bath by heavily armoured troopers, the heightened sense of danger that places them in is significant to the plot, so you should use ranks to represent that. If a particular opponent is not skilled, but potentially very damaging, you can use ranks to represent that. If a particular opponent is almost immune to the petty weapons of its opponents, you can use ranks to represent that. If a particular player wants to play that his character always uses a particularly impressive weapon, you can use ranks for that. But most of the time, you can happily ignore them.
Its important to note that ranks are only important if the ability scores are relatively close.
Your example is a good one to illustrate how the HW rules work - if you have a huge rank disadvantage (you are armed with knives/pointy sticks/long fingernails, your enemy has powered battle armour) but you have a huge ability advantage (close to a level of mastery or more), you will probably win anyway. The ranks mostly just mean on the rare occasions when you do lose, you get hurt more.
It does have one arguably important consequence, if your characters tend to play the odds - without edges, the mathematically best strategy for the superiour opponent is to bet small, which makes for boring contests. If the underdog has a big advantage in ranks, that's not necessarily true, so it can encourage more dramatic actions from your heroes if you have a problem in that direction.
Extended contests have the desired consequence that heroic characters tend to be heroic, and not hampered by petty realism. YMMV as to whether this is what you want in a game, and if you desperately want more 'realism' there are ways to do it (eg give bonuses for superiour equipment as well as edges), but HW is designed to simulate stories not simulate physics.
Cheers David
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