It's going to be a trivial amount of extra work. Packaging build systems (well, the mainstream ones: Debian, RPMs, ebuilds etc.) have the concept of runtime and build-time dependencies, so the maintainers will just need to add a few more packages to the build deps list.

Many distributions have a policy of not using generated files, and more are implementing it after the xz hack. Most package systems have (not just Debian) have the concept of build and deploy dependencies. It is of course more work, and package systems tend to not be well documented and so it is hard to figure out, but it is possible: if you ask the experts they will help

IIRC Debian has a policy on preferring to generated files themselves. I couldn't find the link to it right now, though.