I prefer the Shindo scale in Japan, which better informs you how people actually felt it/it affected infrastructure. Each earthquake doesn't get "one" shindo scale, you get a map of shindo readings for each location it was felt in. Then you can say "this earthquake was up to shindo X" if you want to tell somehow the worst effects of it, or "at my house it was shindo X-2" and people understand "oh so you were pretty far away huh"