I bought a n3ds a few years ago, solid purchase. Emulates almost anything from before the 3ds, and the homebrew/modding scene is fantastic.

Today I hacked my 2DS for the first time. This can be challenging to do, depending on how technical you are and how much experience you have in this field. The process is long and can be complicated, one has to be very careful and use commandline tools and so on. If you are unsure, ask a friend who knows this stuff to do this for you. Otherwise if you do something wrong, it could brick your system or you loose your data.

For anyone wanting to get into: https://3ds.hacks.guide/key-information.html

Still have my original release day 3ds with the extra gba games i got on it and a n3ds i bought shortly before it got before it got sunset. Still my favourite console ever, yes i like it more than the ds, crucify me. And on the modded n3ds gba games run excellently which is also a huge dub cause i love gba games as well. I can even play ps1 games on it which is cursed but i do it sometimes.

Still using my release edition 3DS here (modded to hell lol).

I think a big part of the popularity is the portability. The whole folding family of devices from Nintendo naturally needs no case (the screen is protected), and it fits easily in pockets where the switch 1/2 doesn’t. Also it has a huge library of games that you can get for “”free””).

As for the more recent popularity, I think with how much Nintendo is jacking up the price of the switch2 and games, of course some people will look to older hardware, especially if they never experienced it when it was new. I’ve been a diehard Nintendo guy since the GBC and N64, but I’m skipping the switch 2.