LobstaEata (great name BTW), I never would've guessed you be an Obama voter!! My circle is red, LOL! Unfortunately, most circles were red. Oh well--I don't like McCain anyway.
I wasn't trying to say what was implied in your third paragraph. AsFy, 0.85f'cAc, and Sum(Qn) are just computed to set V' (talking 2005 AISC here, not 1989, which is very old when it comes to composite beam design). V' gives us what we need to figure out hte exact plastic stress distribution that's used to compute Mn.
I don't think of 0.85f'cAc and AsFy as "limit states," but just numbers that we use to help d the plastic stress distribution.
The real point was that the original question is invalid.