Revisit: having both a `178MC and a Nikon D7500, I will more or less stand by what I said. The single biggest benefit of the ZWOMC are its physical attributes: it fits to the telescope more naturally, it is much ligher which makes things easier for guiding/tracking and it has smaller pixels/sensor size which is a good fit for smaller or more remote DSOs such as galaxies and planetary nebulae. Literally the only practical plus of the Nikon is I can focus fairly quickly and accurately with live view. Looking at a computer monitor next to the camera and going back and forth to make adjustments is not as convenient, actually it is very frustrating.
Now, the ZWO sensor is super-sensitive but the quality of the DSLR's sensor is simply unparalleled. The D7500 has no amp glow, the offset frame is near zero and darks are necessary only above 20 degrees or so, and only for exposures longer than 60 seconds. Even then, their value is questionable if you are limited by sky glow/light pollution and it is usually a much better idea to just use a bad pixel map.
On the contrary, the ZWO cannot be used without calibration frames. Its offset has visible patterns even at very high gains and normal frames have a horrendous amp glow which is like a star the size of Mintaka complete with diffraction spikes [!] at the top right corner of the image, as well as several hot pixels which are *not* the same in every frame (so you need to dither tens of frames to get rid of them). I have also seen strange, ghost like artifacts close to bright light sources which I am not sure where they come from (some kind of reflection phenomenon I would guess).
Now all this is not exactly bad. It is the price you pay for the insane quantum efficiency/sensitivity since a sensitive CMOS will not react only to your desirable signal but also to other sources such as its own heat. I have seen the same phenomenon with the D7500 itself. Compared to the D3300 I had before, the sensor has more hot pixels, more visible thermal noise and a slightly "dirtier" image feeling overall. But it is way more sensitive, I have captured the same targets with the same ISO and the difference is obvious, well worth having to create a bad pixel map once every two years or subtract the occasional dark frame when it's really hot
The ` ``178MC simply takes this many steps farther, you get a raw 80% QE completely unmodified which means you *have* to do serious calibration.
And as everyone here will tell you, serious calibration is realistic only with cooled cameras, not so much because lower temperature reduces noise but because it cooling = regulated temperature = you can very easily create calibration frames that are a precise match for your lights.
In a nutshell: for a small target the 178MC will allow you to frame and capture better quality signal, but significant effort will be required to remove the unwanted stuff and everything will be easier if you go cooled. For wide field and the larger/brighter messier objects, the DSLR will give you results of much better quality with much less hassle.
DSOs have very different techniques compared to planetary.