There's a lot of solutions to this problem because like everything Hackintosh there's a lot of possible causes, but hopefully if anyone else is experiencing the same problem as me, the keywords here will make this one stand out.
TL:DR; Corrupted or damaged installer that kept failing to work despite trying to replace it with new installer in multiple different ways was causing the failure. I fixed it by first completely and totally wiping the boot drive in Disk Utility on the installer USB (AT THE DEVICE LEVEL), then deliberately trying and failing to install High Sierra and getting the Mac OS can not be installed on your computer message, and then finally, with USB plugged in, at the Clover boot stage, choosing recover option.
I tried many different methods to install High Sierra on my previously El Capitan. This methodology will seem obvious to many but there's a reason it wasn't initially so hopefully this is still of use to some.
My problems all started when I accidentally installed some kind of a system destroying update. I was too cheap and stupid to have a backup boot drive, so it completely fucked my boot drive, this was just an AppStore update, and it wasn't even the High Sierra or Sierra update (I was running El Capitan), just the usual run of the mill updates that usually work fine just like on a real mac. No idea what happened there, but there you go.
This meant I had a fucked up non-functioning El Capitan install on my system and I was attempting to install High Sierra. My first issue was that I could only get a stub installer of 22MB instead of the full 5GB High Sierra Installer necessary for the Hackintosh. Unbeknownst to me, you can actually use this stub installer to get the update app without actually attempting to run the update app, and if I HAD known that, I probably could have save myself a lot of pain a while ago, so if you didn't already go far down the track of trying other means of getting the High Sierra Installer app and then variously doing things that corrupted/damaged it, just follow this (link)[https://www.Tonymacx86/threads/fix-solution-for-selected-mac-os-x-installer-is-incomplete.249330/]
Anyway, I went scouring the web for many different means of trying to get it, eventually settling on (Dosdude's patcher app)[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi_88DrgLzkAhWJmBQKHUhOBzoQFjAAegQIBxAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdosdude1.com%2Fhighsierra%2F&usg=AOvVaw0_ZzNLldA9Nngn43YEihXh]
This didn't work and gave me the Mac OS can not be installed error, so I tried 101 different solutions before thinking perhaps the installer app could be at fault and finding (this solution)[https://www.Tonymacx86/threads/fix-solution-for-selected-mac-os-x-installer-is-incomplete.249330/] for downloading it using the installer app itself and some terminal commands to make it work, and I got the same issue except now the message was slightly different and mentioned not being able to get the installer resources.
I finally twigged that I STILL didn't have a valid installer. It took me a while because all signs indicated it was fine. Dosdude's download lost connection a few times, so I thought maybe that was it, but the AppStore one was a consistent and fast download from start to finish. The trouble was, I'd been making backups of the installer and placing the different download sources in to different folder locations to help me keep track of which version I was using for a given install. It turns out even this is enough to damage it, and you need download ONE version, to ONE place ever, (applications folder is probably best) and have NO other copies anywhere on the hard drive. Not knowing this, I embarked on an incredibly frustrating odyssey trying everything under the sun to get the fucker to install.
My very first attempt to install actually didn't have the full installer, just the stub, and I tried to use corpnewt's internet install guide, but it didn't work, it somehow detected that my hard drive had once had el capitan and for whatever reason when it tried to recover, not only did it try to recover el capitan and not High Sierra, but it also refused and said my mac wasn't registered. However in my various struggles trying to install later on, I noticed at one stage that when I'd been erasing the hard drive I wanted to use for High Sierra, I hadn't been erasing at the level of device, and that some remnants of the old EFI partition must still have been on there causing the corpnewt internet install guide not to work for me.
Now armed with a partial, but failed install of High Sierra on the target hard drive and no trace of the original El Capitan install left, I decided to try booting from the recovery partition and magically, it worked. It installed High Sierra or 're-installed' it and it finally, FINALLY worked.
This method installs High Sierra like on a real mac, so there's no clover on the EFI partition, which means you have to do the kind of stuff you'd normally pre-install, post install and setup clover, otherwise my bios just says it has nothing to boot on the SSD. I'm still currently figuring out how to actually make a bootable EFI on the SSD because thus far, after installing clover and kexts and drivers as per the vanilla guide I'm still getting stuck at the Apple boot screen unless I boot from the USB installer's EFI partition first and then select the SSD from clover. I'm hoping that's just the standard run of the mill Hackintosh problems post install that I can fix with careful troubleshooting though.
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