Hi @voodoochill,
There are several advantages to using PayPal Payments.
The most important one is active support and development as the Standard integration is no longer supported. If you have any questions regarding Standard, you would be referred to PayPal Payments instead.
PayPal Payments was developed with a future-proof architecture and will be supported for a long time.
Beyond this. PayPal Payments provides many features that were not available in any previous integration. I suggest taking a look at the documentation here: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/
And also the upgrade guide here:
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/paypal-payments-upgrade-guide/
PayPal Payments and PayPal Standard are two entirely separate payment gateways. There is nothing that prevents you from going back and forth or even using both at the same time (though this is not recommended).
All the onboarding does is automatically create a new REST application in the PayPal developer site, register the webhooks, and enable relevant features such as Vaulting.
This information is obviously stored in the database, but it won’t impact PayPal Standard.
Kind regards,
Niklas