Agreed that you will get good work-life balance and decent pay with an advisory role in legal service. However, it is currently hard to get in due to the hiring freeze; legal service is hiring against attrition only. So you'll have to wait for someone to leave, and then compete with the rest to get in. Hard but not impossible though.

I wouldn't say that career progression for non-scholars in legal service is almost non-existent. To be fair, the career progression in legal service is, to a large extent, performance driven. It just so happens that the scholars invariably tend to produce better work than the non-scholars and so, it seems as if the non-scholars can't get promoted simply due to the fact that they are non-scholars. There are non-scholars who do fly career wise.

Related alternatives that I think are easier to get in at the moment will be the legal departments of the statutory boards. Career-wise, you will always be a 2nd class citizen to someone who's in legal service/AGC. The pay also isn't as good, although it's still very decent. But if you wish to achieve other objectives such as practising law and still have a life or practise public law, and you can't get into legal service, it's a path worth considering.