Please elaborate. What is dangerous about a braking burn? Sure, it's harder (because you need to carry that fuel), but not impossible in principle.
> Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc)
I'm sorry, when do rockets not work?
Same arguments apply to Saturn, but "we" managed to get Cassini in orbit. It's a matter of scale, not principle.
New Horizons got to Jupiter after ONE year
see what happened with philae, they got two redundant system to land and both failed.
if the scan reveal pluto to have an usable atmosphere, it will be much much easier to land
however, if you look at the trajectory they used it's an orthogonal encounter [1]
that means the speed they have relative one another is quite much more than when you approach calmly from behind using a hoffman transfer or the like - however if you go that route, instead of waiting 10 years you have to wait a load more, probably more like hundreds (exactly what they did with phila, they approached from the closest orbit possible to minimize the correction burn needed [2])
and let us not forget that having anything in space surviving for soo long is a challenge by itself, as having equipment on earth funded for so long to be maintained operational - remember this story about the other spacecraft that was sent to a comet flyby and was out of gas due leaks on its way back? [3] they had to work a great deal just to rebuild the communication equipement in time
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/New_Hori... [2] http://i.imgur.com/TUkKuhf.gif [3] http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/07/attempt-to-retrieve-nas...