I enjoy both movies, but like you prefer
Sheriff over
Gunfighter.
When I first saw these movies on network TV when I was a little kid, I was greatly confused by their overall similarity. I just didn't realize that they were two separate movies, and I thought that I kept misremembering them. It wasn't until years later that I realized they were in fact two movies.
Now that I think of it, the same thing occurred with
Destry (1954) and
Destry Rides Again (1939) to me. (Of course, the
Destry movies were both remakes of the same story, so it is understandable to confuse them.)