Mr. Android thanks for the reply
Allow me to share what I found, and why I'm doing this.
So first off, the reason for this is simply to reduce number of clicks to get in game, nothing more. Its not that its bothersome, just some people prefer a 1 click solution. It is a nice feature that the launcher auto updates/verifies the game files, but I feel like that could be handled in the background on launch anyway, before the client starts. Maybe that wouldn't work here, but that's how I personally would prefer it to behave.
Now looking into the code, I see that its set up much like a website, with html, css, and js files, which I can somewhat comprehend. I see the launcher passes variables to the bootstrapper, and somewhere along the chain it submits this info to your nix systems for authentication. hard to say, since they are obfuscated well enough to prevent me from knowing exactly what's what.
creating a bat file which points to the bootstrapper, will tell you no app is specified. Passing the parameter /t6 zombies (my mode of choice here) allows it to progress to the authentication step. This is the part where I don't fully understand the syntax required to pass, but essentially it tries to authenticate, fails with error 401, and exits.
This leads me to believe that this would be possible, but I don't think I could figure out how to do it myself.
On an unrelated note, I was successful at launching the client after the server on the same computer, and it has not triggered a ban, thankfully. This was more important to me than the shortcut anyway.
If you read all that, thanks for listening!