I actually have/had a half baked script which does this but got distracted …
It would build a host image through some host meta-package and copy the GW and WS into the image. The images were already encrypted and it asks in the initrd for a new password and reencrypted everything. It also grows the partition to fit the disk size.
Encrypting the images before compression is pointless and makes compression a bit harder …
But it should also be possible to supply unencrypted images which get encrypted afterwards.
Hardware and general host OS support is indeed a problem. The meta package also installed graphics drivers or nic firmware. My intention was to not have anything Whonix specific on the host i.e. it should be a normal Debian image and no Whonix specific packages should be installed so that only Debian stuff could possibly break on the host and hence “they” need to fix it^^ . I’m not sure if this is realistic though and users would still probably pop up in the Whonix forum in case something Debian-only breaks.
You could also make an image based on Debian testing with support for newer hardware but then security support would be worse.
I’m not sure if it is feasible to support a host OS for everyones hardware. If the stable or testing images work, good for you, if they don’t we can’t really help you except maybe for adding packages which are in Debian or directing the user to the Debian forums.