If you have your system in 4.5, the new plailect's guide can get you in A9LH without upgrading to 9.2 check it out in: https://github.com/Plailect/Guide/wiki

 

A9LH allows you to boot gateway emunand directly in boot, and gives you the chance to backup/recover sysnand whenever you need.

If you change your mind on gateway, you could cfw anytime too.

 

Gateway *IS* CFW, just a paid one.

When finished installing a9lh, follow https://gbatemp.net/threads/tutorial-using-luma3ds-with-gateway-on-v2-a9lh.431691/ to use your Gateway card with it.

 

Yes - you could sell your GW and your Sky3DS if you want to. And you can have an updated system that behaves like stock but lets you play any game you like :-) No need to worry about updating anything anymore.

 

Personally, I'm in the same situation, just without Sky.
Probably will switch to A9LH today with new guide for:
- additional protection
- quick boot with 100% success (no need to use Settings/DS Profile)
- no more Emunand
- VC and DSi games

But I will still keep GW cart for:
- cheats (not using them, but just in case)
- quick drag&drop ROMs

I hope, GW team will release proper launcher for A9LH v2 "soon" with FIRM protection and without Sysnand mode warning (if it is still there).

 

You need to be in Gateway mode to use the Select menu to load roms from the Gateway card, but you can be in Luma or Gateway mode to play installed cia games.
You can flash your Gateway emuNAND to sysNAND if you wish, but you have to remember never to update your system while in Gateway mode, as you can brick (updating emuNAND is OK, as always, and you can update sysNAND while in Luma as it has proper protections). The 4.0 and 4.1 versions will have an annoying popup if you boot them in sysNAND, but you can use 3.7.1 to avoid this.

 

Hmm, I don't quite understand what you mean...
Can you paraphrase?

Do you mean, that GW can be launched with current A9LH?
Then yes, with couple easy tweaks.
You can boot either Luma by default or GW with pressing down while loading.

Or do you mean, that cia can be used in GW or not?
It was never a problem - everything worked in Emunand and should in Sysnand.
The only downside of GW with Emunand for me were long loading, lack of ability to play VC/GBA and DSi, and impossibility to use DS cards without reinstalling exploit after (with A9LH I can swap R4 and GW freely).
Anyway, in any case, you always can use GW mode for .3ds files and Luma for everything else.

 

Why you assumed, that GW can't be used with ver 11?
The main problem with GW, I think - unability to execute their launcher on higher system firmwares.
Everything in GW perfectly works in Emunand 11, so it should work in Sysnand.
You can get rid of Emunand (if you have one) - just make Emunand backup and restore it to Sysnand (use Hourglass9 or Decrypt9 keeping A9LH).
And, yes - "down" method is just a payload to run GW launcher on Sysnand 11.

 

Can you give link to post or manual, where you got that CIA?
Because I'm referring to this method:
https://gbatemp.net/threads/tutorial-using-luma3ds-with-gateway-on-v2-a9lh.431691/

 

Looks obsolete.
Use my link.