Hi,
I have recently just migrated all of our testing from an external 3rd part product to Zephyr Scale, part of the move was also moving one of our large teams from Zephyr Squad to Zephyr Scale.
The main difference between Squad and Scale is Zephyr Squad is designed for small agile teams. So this is why their testing items appear as Jira issue types on the sprint board as efforts of work. It is every single person's responsibility for that single testing effort.
Zephyr scale on the other hand, as you said is prettier. It has its backend which makes searching faster as it only searches Zephyr and not the entirety of your Jira Cloud. Also, the ability for cross-team collaboration across different Jira projects is something that we are already using heavily.
As for compliance, you can link test cycles or test cases (or both) to a Jira work item to show that testing has been performed on that item. Also, this creates a traceability link in Zephyr which can then be pulled from the reports section.
They also utilise the Jira dashboards well and this is great for a quick view of what is going on in the day-to-day testing world in real time. Think of the dashboards as your reports only you can see many at one time
I hope this helps and if you need more information please let me know!