Personally, I think we've reached the point where computers are more demystified, and we can talk in neutral terms with people about these things. To me, being a hacker means taking things apart and learning how they work; that's a morally neutral act. You can take things apart and learn how they work in order to steal money, or in order to build a great system for helping deliver donated meals to the homeless, or in order to fix something that's broken.
RE to me is not, and has never been, a bad noun/verb though I often see others frowning upon it.
Perhaps because it was associated with breaking proprietary software and people still retain this image.
At the moment, the department where I work is officially called "Reverse Engineering Department" and I see nothing wrong or illegal in the work I do.
Calling hackers crackers when they really do mean 'hackers' needs to be curbed (or maybe not, language evolves). Crackers break open and reverse engineer software. They are not the security system hackers that most people definitely mean to refer to when they use the word. When the warez scene was huge there was a very clear understanding of what the terms meant and you would have never seen a group misusing the term. Maybe this is occurring because people want to be able to apply the latest popular meaning of 'hacker' to themselves but also want to avoid possible negative connotations.
Or perhaps I have everything reversed and it is the old warez scene that turned 'cracker' on its head and used it for their own purposes. (My Carl Sagan-esque reflection on both possibilities.)