Yes, it is a rare case indeed. It's not necessary nor appropiate to
change Babel's behavior.

Long story short, I'm building several LaTeX tables from CSV files
which in turn come from Excel files. I'm not the author of these Excel
files and I have to reproduce them as faithful as possible.

The problem is that a comma is used as a decimal mark instead of a
dot. `string-to-number' correctly interprets numbers such as "1.100"
as floating point. But in this particular case this is not the
expected behavior and the tables get messed up.

Your solution is a much better option. Thanks.