I implemented gzip compression in a fork of this tool (https://github.com/bizplay/win32-disk-imager) which is a command line version. It can create and read a .gz file. So it can do even more than Etcher which can only read .gz files. It should not be that hard to implement this code also in win32diskimager since the code to read/write the image is almost the same. I do not use the mingw compiler (I use MS visual studio) so I am not able to adapt win32diskimager but I am willing to share the code...