I suppose Gateway team want to release 9.6 on all systems at the same time and that the problem is the N3DS.
I bet if they don't manage to make it work on N3DS in a while, they will probably just release an update for other systems (each N3DS emunand update will now bit a problem for them, because of the protections Nintendo added then fixed).
There is already a 9.6 emunand available by someone else, but correct me if I'm wrong, it's only for the old 3DS, not the N3DS one ? (which would explain why Gateway still released nothing about it).
If they already announced a new update, the best would be to wait to directly release the new update (and that's maybe what they are doing) and from what I remember, Gateway already did that once. I think it was with 9.3 and 9.4 which had close releases dates, and they directly released the last version.