While I'm not sure, on the direct effect of wheterer or not that make the Japanese more resistant to american occupation, Kyoto being seen as mostly an attack as target of mostly Cultural importance is very credible
However I kinda wonder if the Americans of the time would have realise that either for or against nuking it
That is the reason given by - IIRC -Strike Command for switching away from Kyoto. Not a whole lot of military targets there anyway, and not representative of other Japanese cities were also reasons given.
A long time ago, when I was stationed at Wright Patterson, I spent some time in the Air Force Library there. There are some really interesting formerly classified documents on the subject there. For some reason, historians don't like to go onto the base to read those documents, generally preferring to quote each other and Japanese documents.
Me, I'm an amateur historian - I was a member of Strategic Air Command at the time - and my mother is a Hiroshima Survivor. Her thoughts on the subject are rather non-PC. She generally used to state amazement that it only took two nukes to wake up the idiots in Tokyo.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked because they had a lot of the same terrain and construction features as many other Japanese cities.
Your crack about Americans not realizing cultural significance might be true of the general run of Americans, or even American bomber crews. Targeteers were always told to consider cultural significance when calculating bomb runs. If you ever have a chance to get to the AF museum, there was a classified magazine -IIRC - "On Target" - that was distributed to bombardiers - had a format not unlike "LIFE Magazine" - with all sorts of information and pictures pertinent to getting bombs on target. Just about every issue had discussions of identifying and avoiding cultural areas to avoid collateral damage - and I saw a couple of "letters to the editor" discussing RAF Bomber Command and their lack of regard for cultural sites. The only place I've ever seen a copy was in the stacks at the AF Library.
But - to get back to your original question - hitting Kyoto, probably would have made little real difference in the war or the post-war period, just different people dying and living. - that would be my opinion. I'd ask Mom about it, but she passed on about six years ago.