Drats.
How a simple enough technical question turns into a tangent post about choices and complex explanations.
LONG READ BELOW (sorry, no TL;DR)
I have this plan to retrieve updates from the four east Asian regions because they're next to impossible to find since the CDN doomsday. JPN alone has over 150 titles. The other three are probably a handful at most. Then again, (all?) new 3DS exclusive titles are AAA ones with plenty of fan support so maybe it's okay to skip these.
The reason for getting an o3DS is that it's not permanently region locked to a single eShop if a NNID isn't tied to it, and you do a System Reformat + region change. The n3DS on the other hand gets stuck with whichever region eShop it first visits with (almost) no way to fix this; only doing a weird form of System Transfer with another matching region n3DS(XL/LL) can undo the eShop block.
If this year's black Friday has the o3DS for sale under $50, I'll snag one at Best Buy with a trade-in gift card been meaning to spend, except I don't want to keep it only for download slaving purposes because that's a waste of potential.
You don't suppose it's too much a dick move to return a 3DS even if it's saran wrapped during handling and reformatted back as close to stock except with the custom firmware kept in place? It's either that or giving it to my nephew who's almost 3 years old, but IMO he's still too young to be playing video games.