Cooking lemon juice into stew

I have recently discovered a much broader use of lemon juice in my cooking and now add it to almost all stews and soups a few minutes before the end of cooking. But I am curious if there are benefits to adding it earlier, e.g. if it will cook in better and give it a zestier flavor if I cook it longer than just adding it at the end of after. One example that comes to mind are fava beans, which are great zesty. The downside of cooking lemon juice is that it can cause undesired curding of some vegetable protein.