Quite a bunch of questions there...
1) The DL110 is a good match for your arm (which is a mid mass arm... 12g effective mass when using the original Technics 7.3g headshell)
2) The M97xE is also a good match for your arm - if the damping brush is in use. - Otherwise it would be a little too high compliance for the mass of the arm.
3) Tracking force is not directly related to compliance - although overall lower compliance designs tend to use more tracking force, and higher compliance designs tend to use less.
4) The M97xE performs perfectly as per the factory specifications and design when it is run at the factory recomended Capacitive and Resistive load... - which is 250pf total capacitance with 47k ohm resistance.
If your capacitance is higher, or lower, you can sometimes balance things out by varying the resistance. - Loading is a fairly complex topic!
Also you can tailor the sound a bit (a lot!) by varying the loading - the normal Shure "house sound" has a slightly lowered high end (hence it tends to sound "smooth") - for those who prefer a slightly more "neutral" sound - and aim for a slightly flatter frequency response, increasing the resistance a touch will help.
This is more "salt and pepper" rather than "right and wrong".
This article is good with showing differences related to capacitance variation:
http://www.tnt-audio.com/sorgenti/shure_m97xe_e.html
DaveyW's page is excellent with the method for varying loading (resistive - but it can apply to capacitive as well)
http://daveyw.edsstuff.org/vinyl/loading/
I suggest further reading on loading if you want to understand it in greater depth....
5) What is better MM / MC .... No specific cartridge type (MM, MC, MI, and exotics like electrostatic, strain-gauge, etc...) has a dominance on "sounding better".
As an example the Technics EPC100mk4 is considered by some people to be the greatest cartridge ever made - it is MM.
However, the current fashion tends towards MC - and as with all things fashion, the majority will therefore recommend the current thing...MC.
Like all things Audio - no two components sound alike, and when you have two top cartridges side by side, which one you prefer is often a matter of taste... (back to the salt and pepper again !)
The things that drive a cartridges/stylus ability to reproduce a recording accurately are:
a) Stylus Shape (in increasing quality: conical, eliptical, line contact)
b) cantilever quality (in increasig quality: aluminium, tapered aluminium, boron/beryllium/ruby)
c) Effective stylus mass (lower is better - most manufacturers don't tell you the mass!)
d) Generator (coil/magnets) efficiency and linearity
The lower the mass of the stylus the better the stylus ... given that the coils are directly attached to the cantilever on an MC design, the fewer coils there are the better (as it will be lighter) - the consequence of this is that the better cartridges have lower output. (there are also linearity and associated fine detail issues associated with the use of permeable vs non permeable cores, this results in very low output MC's being even better in many cases)
However - due to the low output, you then need more amplification/gain to make up for it. And if the quality of this amplification is not high enough, you will increase the noise level. - So LOMC involves additional phono stage costs in the form of either higher gain electronics or additional transformers... these need to be very high quality.
In MM designs, the same thing applies, which is why the very best MM (and MI) designs, have had lower output than the mainstream ones - they used more powerful magnetic materials, but with much smaller magnets - to keep the moving mass down.
Where most MM's have around 5mV output, some of the top models had 2.5mV or even 1.5mV. (and then there are LOMM's with similar outputs to a LOMC cartridge... a rare breed)
The cantilever is also often overlooked - different materials have different strengths, weights and rigidities.
The consequence of this variation are:
a) Differing effective mass (the most obvious)
b) Cantilever resonance shifts to a higher frequency as the stiffness of the cantilever rises - the cantilever resonance has an impact on the sound of all cartridges - it is non-linear, and therefore undesirable - but is frequently used in tuning the overall sound of a cartridge design. - The best designs shift the resonance high in the ultrasonic range, to minimise its impact on the audible frequencies
c) cantilever skew/twist - the more rigid the cantilever, the less it skews and twists - when it moves this way, it converts more of the recorded energy into distortion rather than sound - on a frequency response plot, all cartridges show this as a slight (0.5db to 2db) drop somewhere between 2kHz and 10kHz - the stiffer exotic materials reduce this effect substantially - some designs "cover this up" by using either electrical or cantilever resonance to provide a more balanced/flat frequency response - but a distortion measurement of the cartridge often shows this "hump" in distortion....
Shorter cantilevers, and stiffer cantilevers reduce this effect.
6) Yes a Jico SAS can sound better than many an MC (Boron cantilever, microridge needle, light powerful magnets) - but there are plenty of MC's that will outperform a SAS too.... at a price! - Yes I think the M97xE-SAS combination is probably a better cartridge than the DL110 - but a DL-S1 might be quite a different kind of competition!
The single most important determinant of a cartridges overall "sound" is the cantilever design and suspension - the resonances, and skew/twist are unavoidable - affect the sound and are different with each design (although they are subtle).
In terms of compliance matching with a Technics SL1200mk2 arm - one of the biggest upgrades is the KAB fluid damper... which will help with all cartridge types, and allow matching with higher compliance cartridges.
When choosing a cartridge, my criteria would be :
1) Do I like the "house sound"
2) Compliance matching with the arm
3) Cantilever
4) stylus type
5) Generator type (MM / MC) is BY FAR the lowest criteria
Hope this all helps
Bye for now
David
So what are you after? You say bass heavy music, but I'll bet you want that bass to be tight? 
