"2) A massive deceleration to stop while still in orbit. I don't know if that's viable or not. It would have to be extremely sudden - hence setting up massive and dangerous G forces - anything less than very sudden deceleration and the orbit would instead simply decay as per normal, and you'd be re-entering the atmosphere with full heat effects, before you knew it. Sure you'd have a bit more leeway a thousand miles up than 200 miles up, but not much. "

There is no need of a massive deceleration of high gees.

Normally one re-enter earth by lowering the perigee of the orbit so it intersects the atmosphere. This doesn't require very much delta-v, something like 1 km per sec. One is doing a Hohmann transfer orbit.
If the planet had no atmosphere, one would change the orbit so it was near intersecting the surface and burn at perigee in order to land [unless you want to crash on the surface].

If one applied 10 m/s/s [just over 1 gee] for 700 seconds [less than 12 mins] you could stop your orbital speed of 7 km/sec. This would be about same gees as you are experiencing sitting in your chair. If one applies 20 m/s/s it of course, it takes 350 seconds- same gee loads as high performance jet fighter gets taking off a runway at full throttle. On a shuttle launch one would at some point experience twice these gees.

Stopping your orbital speed doesn't make much economical sense if you at 1000 mile orbit, but you could avoid re-entry heat if one uses enough delta-v from a rocket. For instance, from 1000 mile orbit, one could land on Earth as though Earth had no atmosphere to use for aerobraking: Lower your perigee and then fire your rocket again near perigee- you wouldn't go straight down- instead it would be suborbital, but other than than the two burns you have a long freefall.

Let's suppose you wanted to fall from 1000 miles and you aren't worried about the delta-v cost and don't want travel half way around the world- you wanted to fall straight down. In orbit of course, you are always falling towards earth, and your orbital speed is fast enough so you miss hitting earth. So, if get rid of all or most of orbital speed you will go straight down, and falling at rate of around 9.7 m/s/s, so after say 500 seconds of falling you will travel about 745 miles and be traveling at 4.8 km/sec [10,842 mph- about 3 miles a second] and are about a minute from hitting a wall called the atmosphere. Now if you had a "rocket belt" that give about 2.4 km/sec of delta-v in about minute burn, this would probably be about time to start it- it would need to provide just over 4 gees for a minute [the actual gees range because rocket fuel is used up might be between 2- 6 gees].
Without any rocket acceleration in 560 seconds you travel about 934.7 miles and reach 5.4 km/sec [3.3 miles a second]. With the average acceleration of 40 meters per sec per sec in 60 seconds you reach 2.4 km/sec and distance traveled of 44.7 miles. So roughly, at end of 60 second burn you traveling at 3 km/sec and traveled total distance of 890 miles [you are 110 miles above the surface and with gravity attraction of basically 9.8 m/s]. During the rocket burn you got 145 miles closer to earth surface. So with a rocket providing only 2.4 km/sec is doubtful you could then use parachutes/or balloons and surivive, and without the 2.4 rocket delta-v it be certain death- you would be a bug on the windscreen.

A two stage rocket, which provided say 2.4 km/sec, with second stage giving say 1.8 km/sec plus a parachute could probably get you safely to the surface from 1000 miles high falling directly towards earth.