If were talking about a project that could do with a 1280 I don't know why we are comparing it to the price of a tiny with a lot less processing power that will probably fall short anyway. Regardless. Its still my choice to throw money around and have enough power to throw floats around. I think that solves the money problem.
Your Kludge is a kludge.
A kludge (or kluge) is a workaround, a quick-and-dirty solution, a clumsy, inelegant, difficult to extend, hard to maintain yet effective and quick solution to a problem, and a rough synonym to the terms "jury rig", "Jugaad" or "jerry rig".
which leads me to backwards learning, I mean if someone sees your kludge and they aren't aware of the lack of float support they will most likely come to your desk and ask you what is going on. Instead you could enable floating support because your platform obviously needs it if you are writing that code.
Without wanting to flog a dead horse here i'll make it brief, The option to enable floats should be a part of the arduino core. Do you have any arguments to just that sentence that make it not being an option logical?