If you're doing the suicide burn with the main engine, you have to flip inside the atmosphere (while supersonic), and also need to lose large chunks of the nozzle (not just to get it out of the way of landing legs, but because firing the engine in the atmosphere would otherwise generate turbulent flow within the nozzle which would tear the thing apart). If you're using a different engine, then you've added a whole lot of extra weight from the engine itself and its plumbing (and tankage for its fuels if, like the Dragon 2 Superdracos, it's not burning LOX and Kerosene).

So, adapting the first-stage recovery strategy is not an obvious slam dunk -- in fact, it might very well be worth considering alternatives involving parachutes if you can get the thing intact through re-entry. (Note that the Falcon 9 v1.0 first stages on which they actually tried parachute recovery are believed to have not gotten that far -- they reportedly broke up before the parachutes even deployed.)