"So it seems Scotland now has proportionally more cases than England despite the tougher restrictions being in place."
I imagine this disparity will only grow looking at the UK dashboard case data by specimen date. Bars in grey are subject to change, with the most recent ones likely to have the most added on. England looks to be at it's peak now as a worst case, probably slightly beyond it, but Scotland still seems to be very much on an upward trend. I think the new thinking is that it's not possible to prevent cases with restrictions (sorry 'protections'), you can only defer them, and all our 'suppression' seems to achieve is bigger peaks and troughs of infection rather than the more steady level England saw. At this point in the pandemic, with the experience of previous waves, this kind of thinking (suppression through restrictions) just seems amateurish.
Sturgeon might get spooked by the high numbers and persist with restrictions for longer, but you could also argue that it's better to get the peak out of the way while booster immunity is still relatively fresh for the vulnerable. Do we really want to push it a couple of months down the line again only to have cases/hospitalisations rise when boosters in the oldest age groups are starting to wane again? This takes a lot of courage though, and I'm not sure Sturgeon has it. She seems to be too scared to even soften the isolation rules to allow society to function, so accepting a high wave of infections, even if it better in the long run, might be beyond her.