Well, if you want to cancel your orbital velocity, such that you are drawn into the sun, it does take a lot of energy. But you could also transfer transverse momentum in a fly-by with a planet and head straight into the sun, which is a cheaper way of doing it.

Still, it's something that might well seem counterintuitive to people not familiar with orbital mechanics.

Certainly it takes a lot of energy for that. Which is why no one does that, and every probe sent to Mercury or to Pluto has used an assist.

I submit that the comment "It takes more energy to crash a rocket into the sun than it does to crash a rocket into Pluto" focuses wrongly on energy, when the important factor is time. Delta-v computed by Hohmann transfer orbits are simple to compute, yes, but leads to an "intuition" which excludes things like low-energy transfer trajectories.

One thing at a time. We first need to get people away from the "intuitive" terrestrial mindset that distance = difficulty. The example, that it would take more energy to drop a rocket on the sun than to hit Pluto (directly, absent more advanced tricks) is a good starting point.

As a first approximation, the terrestrial mindset is that distance = difficulty. However, rivers, swamps, oceans, forests, deserts, and mountains all modify that statement. Anyone on a river knows that it takes longer to go upstream than down, and someone who has been in eddies, rip currents, or the Gulf Stream well knows that distance and difficulty are only roughly correlated.

So it's not that hard to convince terrestrials to use an alternate-but-still-terrestrial energy model, where the Sun is at the top of a high peak, the Earth is on the flank of the mountain, Pluto is near the base, and the terrain is rough enough that things don't just roll down the hill.

That image you showed, with delta-v based on Hohmann transfer orbits, maps directly to that terrestrial energy model. As that energy model is obviously wrong - there is no friction in space - it means that that delta-v map is inadequate as a teaching method.

Yes, you've gone from crystal spheres to epicycles, but you can't use that new knowledge to understand most of the routes that we actually use for spacecraft.

Take the planned Solar Probe Plus as a quite relevant example. Its original plan was to fly by Jupiter, but now it's expected to use multiple flybys of Venus.

You cannot explain that with a delta-v map. Moreover, I argue that pointing to a delta-v map as an explanation is itself a sign of a terrestrial mindset.

To get back to the topic of "crash into the Sun" and "crash into Pluto" - to the best of my understanding, it's easier to build a rocket that can crash into the Sun than can crash into Pluto, and it takes less time to achieve that goal.

Once you can reach L2, you can crash into anything in the Solar System, if you're willing to wait long enough. Reaching Pluto takes a very long time, so it's much more likely to be affected small unforeseen events, like solar storms. Corrections require propulsion. Propulsion control requires computers. Computers require energy. All of these require mass. A Pluto-crash mission requires more mass than a Solar-crash mission, so is harder to build to get to L2 in the first place.

Most of the large amount of verbiage you've produced in these threads are flights of fancy involving sloppy logic you've concocted then tried to attribute to me, or are redundant expressions of ideas I've already stated which are also trying to masquerade as a "correction." This is not what I term good discourse.