As you mentioned, English Advanced has the advantage of superior alignment when compared to English Standard, which is a reason that often results in students choosing English Advanced over English Standard. The good thing is that you can take English Advanced in year 11 and based on your experience, you could make a decision as to whether to keep English Advanced or drop to English Standard as you begin year 12, which comes at no expense given that none of your year 11 results will contribute to your HSC results or ATAR.
With that being said, I think it would safe to suggest that English Advanced is more difficult than English Standard, one of the reasons being that it encompasses more complex texts (this is with reference to year 12) such as classic texts (for example, Shakespeare) as opposed to the more modern texts in the case of English Standard. Of course, I believe that taking English Advanced in year 11 would be the better choice because the option to drop to English Standard remains available, whereas if you take English Standard in year 11, you will not be able to take English Advanced if you change your mind at a later point in time.
I hope this helps!
