For some environments there might be light in the end of the tunnel for this: In the 11.6.0. cumulative hotfix release notes (HF4), released last week, there is a fix mentioned:
"474332F5 will start releasing "base installable" VM images as part of hotfix release. The VM images will consist of base RTM + installed hotfix on top of it. Such images are going to be ready for deployment without the need to apply hotfix as an additional step."
Note the "VM images". What does this mean is a bit unclear to me. Does it refer to cloud environments or VE's in general? Couldn't find the single full 11.6.0 RTM+HF4 .iso at the downloads.