Why "shuttle" solves this
Larry,
You said: "If they came in too shallow, they'd skip off the atmosphere and be lost in space."
But that leads to the question how 'lost' is lost? Having ditched the service module anything other than a landing was death for Apollo, but a craft with full orbiter life support could easily skip out to a 24 hour orbit for example, while using the combination of thrust and further braking you mentioned to rectify any problem. It actually might be the preferred mode to preserve the tps by shedding heat and then coming the rest of the way in. I do agree that a rigid structure will be the answer at least at first.