If you want to collide with it softly then you pretty much have to go at about the same speed: there are no soft collisions with relative velocities over 500 m/

If you want to collide with it softly then you pretty much have to go at about the same speed: there are no soft collisions with relative velocities over 500 m/s, and 500 m/s is small when talking about escape velocities. In short: to have any sort of survivable encounter with the object the relative velocities need to be so small you have essentially "matched their speed". Those last 0.5 km/s you might gain aren't important compared with the 29.5 km/s you need to put in.