>However, legal avenues to do so are far in between and it requires a huge amount of time and help from peers.

I reverse engineer things for a living and I have many peers worldwide who do the same. My main field of work is malware analysis.

For recreation, in my country it's explicitly legal to reverse engineer things you own, with a purpose of making it work on your system (think: fixing a windows XP game so it works on windows 10). This is a very broad loophole, and let's you reverse engineer things in most cases when they "feel" like they should be legal.