Intense and SC have lots of similarities across their respective lines. Personally, I’ve always felt Intense gets more efficiency out of the VPP platform and the very slight difference in geometries also has me preferring Intense.
But SC offers one thing which may be important here; the Hightower can run 27.5+ OR standard 29. If you think you might ever want to invest in a second wheelset, it’d be like having two bikes in one.
In narrowing down to these two, have you actually ridden both?