Userland Homebrew VS A9LH VS B9S

Imagine the 3DS inner workings as a mansion's smart home equipment. Let Harry represent regular homebrew, Alice represent A9LH, and Bob represent B9S.

Alice, Bob, and Harry have been assigned to infiltrate a mansion and hijack its smart home equipment. Each agent belongs to a different division with their own special characteristic:

• Harry's division is operating on a shoestring budget, so he's stuck breaking and entering through whatever way he can find; this takes so much time, the mansion's smart home tech is fully on when he gets to it.
• Alice's division has some leftover equipment from a previous mission, so she spends time before the day of the hijack to manipulate the buzzer at the gates to bypass speaking with security when she pushes the button.
• Bob's division found the front gate's manual key and has copied it for him, so he can enter whenever he wants.

Each approach gets each agent different results:

• Harry can only perform basic tasks (custom games, some apps, etc.) with the smart home equipment after he has infiltrated the mansion because the core of the system has already been locked down by the time he can break in.
• The gate buzzer only activates when the smart home equipment is turned on, so by the time Alice makes it to the main systems she still gets escalated privileges (CIA installation, that reimplementation of the eShop everybody likes to use for some reason, etc.) but can still only do so much with the system.
• Bob is already in the mansion and in the driver's seat before the smart home tech even comes on, so he's in complete control (encrypting and decrypting games on a PC, etc.).

Of course, with all these sneaky Petes running around in the mansion, Sammy the maintenance man (representing system updates) is out to stop them from entering:

• Sammy is able to reinforce areas where Harry has broken in before, so he's always stuck looking around for new weaknesses.
• Alice was diligent enough to lock down her modified buzzer with so many locks (representing 3DS custom firmware) it isn't worth Sammy's time; however, if she forgot to do this Sammy could have undone all her work.
• Sammy can only replace the gate by spending money he doesn't have in the maintenance budget, so Bob gets off scot free.

But what about time? Each agent surely has to spend some time preparing for their mission!

• Harry's division has to scan every nook and cranny for a new way into the mansion every time Sammy fixes the way they previously went in, so regaining access could take months; even if everyone pitches in to pay their way into the mansion, they still have to redo their exact methods for getting in which takes at minimum a few days.
• Alice's preparation with the buzzer takes about an hour; one false move with the electronics and Alice could have killed herself.
• Bob's division spent a few bucks and about five to ten minutes at the local key copy machine.

Of course, there are many more benefits to B9S than this analogy can scope out (and indeed are yet to be known), but hopefully the differences should now be a bit easier to understand.