Prevent window autoselect on application launch
As far as I'm aware, there is no ideal solution, unless you're willing to disable SIP (maybe).

I think your best bet may be the bash command open:

Bash:

open -ga "Google Chrome"


Applescript: 

do shell script "open -ga 'Google Chrome' "


These will open the specificed appliction without stealing focus


  The application names are case sensitive






If I only needed this while using terminal, I'd perhaps use aText to expand open chrome to the above command and so on... Not that it's much shorter, but I'd prefer that.





You can use third party applications to launch apps and scripts: 

Alfred, Launchbar, FastScripts, Apptivate etc... there are tons of apps that do this.

You could also make an Application using Automator.app, that just runs the terminal command and you can add that app to the dock. This has it's own problems though, because the actual application icon will show up in the Dock as soon as you click your custom Dock icon and now you got two icons for the same app in the dock... oh well.





As a side note, you can also open a specific website:

Bash:

open -ga "Google Chrome" "http://askdifferent.com"


Applescript:

do shell script "open -ga 'Google Chrome' 'http://askdifferent.com' "



  In other applications you can open a file by replacing the url with a path to a file.