I've been powering off VM's abruptly as a last resort for years and never had the VM state corrupted - sure it can cause problems with the guest OS, but this has never actually manifested into a real problem for my purposes. I realize it's not ideal in terms of the guest OS, but I don't understand why this should have any impact on the VMWare host process at all. I'm not sure what you mean by killing processes - if clicking the red "stop" button in Vmware is "killing" a host process, that seems like bad software design. I would think that pressing that button just blows away whatever guest OS state is active.
I'm not sure I understand your suggestion, maybe I've not explained my setup (I use local VMs). Closing the VMWare UI on the host OS would force shutdown my active VMs.