Accessorise, Any woman will tell you, It's all about the accessories. Here are two that I consider essential.
A Weak link: This is like a strop or a rope or something else that you know the breaking strain of and that you don't mind breaking. So for instance if you have 6000 kgbs plasma rope you should also have say 4500 kgbs short strop that will break before the plasma.
(Personally I like a piece of Hawser laid jute rope because it signals when it's going to break, strands start popping. For the same reason I never use Stainless wire rope, it gives no warning at all. Just the twang as it cuts yur ass from the rest of you. On our wreckers we had a selection of hand spliced wire strops that were disposable)(covers rule 1) This means that you know exactly where to put your backlash damper. For straight out heavy winch pulls, a shear pin plate is the best device especially if in a situation where a break in the haulline is an absolute no-no. (I'll throw up some pics and designs for one of these) Which brings us to item 2.
Backlash Damper: These can take a number of forms. Old tyre is good, some guys liked to cut half way around the circumference in the middle of the tread so that it would slip long ways over the rope after tension was put on. Personally I prefer to put it on before taking the strain and attaching it loosely to the haulline. My personal favourite tho is a canvas bucket with a long tail onto the handle. The tail is attached to your haulline with a loose loop knot like a bowline. The bucket you can fill with dirt or water or sand or whatever. Also really good when you have heavy objects in the line like shackles. Take the sting out of the shackle and the rest follows.(You can have several tails coming off the bucket. if you need. Not necessary to have a lot because your system will only break in one place at any one time and of course you obeyed rule 2 in any case.
An upside with the bucket is you can use it to carry water. Very useful when your Wrecker is an RL Bedford... or an International Scout....or any International.
The other advantage is that the tail can be shoved in the empty bucket and tossed in the locker and it takes up bugger all room. Ours were about 20 litre size with about 4 metres of inch dia cordage tail, but for light vehicle size probably 8 litre would be good with some old written-off plasma or webstrap. All you're doing is dissipating the energy, the effect is to damp it not stop it dead.
They're also useful as a throw bag. If you have a wagon stuck in a fast flowing creek you can use it as a weight to throw a line to a person in the vehicle so they can pull a towline across without putting someone at risk in the current.
Probably any good canvas/cover shop could make one of these up. We used rope handles but web would be the thing now. With rope, the handles should go right round in pockets so that the bucket part isn't a stress member, but with web straps I should think that full stitch to the Canvas or ripstop or whatever should work. The only thing I probably wouldn't use is woven polyprop cloth. It's not that durable. Ripstop and 1 tonne web would work.
All that being said, one of the best ways to lessen backlash is to simply use blocks in the system. Invariably when a break happens everything just goes limp because you have different tensions and drags happening all through the system. Lash only happens when ALL the energy gets focused and released at a single point. With blocks in the system, every lay has different tension, tensions vary either side of a pulley, the weight of a block has a damping effect and so on and so on.
it was after terror training down southland and I was out for a play on the motorbike they were useing one of the old bedford ones to pull a flash new mog out of a creek.... they had rope everywhere... at one stage they had the whole winch truck hanging on ropes!! (between the anchors and the truck they were winching)
dozer to normal people 
, skidders and haulers) I can tell you it does
Something like what you describe you could use as a tree protector as well. 
