If you mean reverse engineering the 3DS and documenting it, I don't think there needs to be any other reason or 'justification' to it.
Reverse engineering is fun for it's own reasons. That's good enough.
On the other hand I don't think it's right or ethical that you can buy a console and "own" it and yet not be able to use it the way you want to, including having full access to it ( from a hardware or software perspective ) or even run whatever code you want on it, instead somebody else decides that for you which makes absolutely no sense to me. That's not ownership. It's like a rental console that Nintendo/whoever owns and you get to touch and look at and play it - but only what they say you're allowed to of course and pay for all replacements and repairs, games and addons.
That's like buying a car and then finding out you can't drive it anywhere you wanted because Toyota or Honda didn't authorize first ( and you paying extra for the privelege too ) and too bad because they made the car you "own".
I consider it as the wrong approach to a broken or outdated business model ( regarding piracy and trying to protect data as if it were either a stealable or ownable object when it just isn't. ).
I think that if businesses were smart/wise enough and knew what they were doing they would not make systems that allowed piracy to exist or "hurt them" financially in the first place; not rely on people not to pirate their games because that's invevitably going to come up as an issue at some point and time seems to show that it's an ever loosing battle that criminalizes end-users pre-emptively ( before they've actually done anything wrong ) that consists of gimping hardware or software more to make a unrealistic business model "work". (regarding theft of data).
I've met people that were simply extremely creative and could make something on an opened platform better than a lot of the licensed professionally made products you can pay for given the same system. I think it's a good thing because it adds value to a system to have hobbiest creators/devs able to do so and it might also help them as well indirectly ( they might go commercial, shareware, or simply get donations in support of whatever they've created as well ). I think that's both in their interest and more indirectly everybody's. As a game player I'd like a really well made chunk of software even if it was made by a homebrew/third-party unofficial dev. and wouldn't mind dropping a few dollars or more to them if it was worth it to me. If that means they get paid, their living standard rises a little, and they get thanks for the creativity they were obviously already capable of, possibly for them to keep on doing it, then even better still. That doesn't devalue N's ( or whoever's ) console but the opposite theoretically and that type of work can also contribute to a community congretating around the system - these in theory are all good things.
If an exploit was found that users could take advantage of ( that wasn't a hardware modification or something impossible for most people to get their head around without jumping through too many flaming hoops to do so... ) then I would use the exploit for the sake of data mining and gaining more insight into the way the console worked from the inside out. I would then look into coming up with other exploits using that information and consider them for release so other third party developers or groups could both learn from it and have a chance use it and further their own projects. Exploits are usually patchable one by one but knowledge is irreversible.
It depends on how open the system is before further data mining and after extensive data mining was done. If the system was downgradable and system updates could be intercepted, taken apart and patched or replaced, well, you'd have a lot less reason to worry about a released exploit being patched.
You are posting this question on a gaming enthusiast forum on the internets where gaming and piracy are both common and individuals that actually reverse engineer their consoles or what they're talking about, appear be ranging from rare to non-existant. So of course you're going to get bias answers. (advocating gaming / pirating). Just saying.
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