Fair enough - and indeed, the Lunar delta-v needed is usually quite small. Apparently Chang'e 5 sample module needed just 1,67 km/s to reach lunar orbit for exa

Fair enough - and indeed, the Lunar delta-v needed is usually quite small. Apparently Chang'e 5 sample module needed just 1,67 km/s to reach lunar orbit for example. Still, I think there are definitely cases where atmosphere helps (even if it causes issues elsewhere). So even if you used propulsive breaking to get captured into orbit of a body with atmosphere for safety reasons, you can still capture into a very eccentric orbit & then carefully use aerobraking (as demonstrated many times at Mars already) to lower and circularize your orbit before landing. And with a bit better aerosurfaces you could even use the atmosphere to tune your orbits inclination as needed.