Firstly, I don’t like playing AQ out of position against a table of limpers.
If you call pre-flop, then most of the time you are going to be check-folding the flop.
When you do get a good flop e.g. Q,8,6, then you can bet out to protect your hand, but you’re not going to like it because there is a good chance you may get raised as there are 7 players to get by, and they can’t all be playing trash. There must be a few pocket pairs out there, and you just gotta hope that none of them has hit a set.
If you receive the above flop and decide to check with the intention of raising all-in, that’s not a bad move. It may work out, it may not, but you can’t sit around all day having less than 20 BBs, you have to get in there and take a chance.
So like I said, if you call pre-flop then most of the time you will be check-folding, but a small percentage of the time you have to play some poker. Nobody wins tournaments by not taking chances, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth.

Alternatively, you can raise pre-flop. There is 1200 in the pot, and you have about 2800 left. A pot sized raise leaves you with 1600. If you raise the pot, and someone reraises putting you all-in, then you have a clear call. The only hands you are worried about are AA, KK and AK. It is unlikely anybody has AA or KK except UTG, and if he reraises, then you have an easy call as he had only 2000 at the start of the hand.
However a pot size raise takes 45% of your chips, so you are probably better going all-in instead.

Whether I called or raised would depend on what the table was like, and how I was perceived. You wrote a fair bit about your considerations, it would have been better to tell us what the table was like. You can’t expect anybody to analyse this properly if you’re going to withhold so much information.

To be honest, I can’t make much sense of your considerations. You seem to be overly worried about the villain. If you raise pre-flop and he reraises ‘on principle’, you should love that as you will have an easy call.