Answer:
The purpose of the AOC was to keep the government small and weak. Many of the states wanted state power to be over federal power, so the AOC was the first way to achieve that. It failed because it only had a legislative branch to make laws, but did not have any executive branch to enforce laws or judicial branch to discern laws. At first, the states were suspicious of a large central power and this was the reason they resisted the AOC. However, in the end, the reason all the states ratified the AOC was because it claimed all new western land to be part of the federal government to sell (to new landowners) to pay off the national debt. This allowed for no one state to get an absurbly large amount of land due to a "claim" while other states did not get any land. That was up to the AOC government. However, it was a large failure, mainly because it had no power to enfore anything ever, but that is how the states originally wanted it.