Comparative evolutionary study: is amino acid or nucleotide comparison more useful?
Each has its own utility, depending on the time-frame you are looking at. For evolutionary studies, you need variation, but not so much variation that one substitution at the same position overwrites a previous substitution. So if you are looking at deep splits, over hundreds of millions of years, it may be that amino acids are more reliable. But you are correct in that since they are functionally more important than silent substitutions (nucleotide changes that don't change the amino acid), it is possible to have amino acids converge on the same state, independently. Nucleotides do this too. Both require statistical models (maximum likelihood) that accommodate the possibility of multiple changes at the same site. If you are looking at recent evolutionary splits, there may not be enough (or any) amino acid changes to compare, so in this case, nucleotides would be better. You would not measure continental drift with a stopwatch, or a 100-meter dash with radiometric dating.