Sure. If I'm going to use a loft surface for my part, I will copy/paste as result with link into my part. Then I will create an offset of that surface using 0.00in as my offset. I then can extract curves, perform offsets, intersects, splits, projects, etc to the Offset, not to the original surface. When I need to replace the original surface with a new surface, it only has one child. Thus, I only get the "replace viewer" once.
This technique also works well with contextual design.