The solution is actually more simple than trying to modify the code everywhere you have quantities work with fractions.
You should create a custom field of the table "item" (only in the Business edition) and of the type "text" published and activated on the front end which will act as the fractional quantity.
Then, you can create a small price quantity calculation override plugin to specify how you want the quantities to be calculated. We have some documentation on there there:
www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/6...tation.html#override
Finally, you can hide the quantity input with CSS if you want.
It's a bit more complicated than just turning on an option as you need to code the plugin (it's around 20 lines top), but it allows way more flexibility as that enables you to calculate complex quantities like prices per weight unit, or per length, or per m², or based on the number of letters the user enters in the input text, etc and even have several different ways of calculating prices based on different custom fields, for different products on your store as you have the whole custom field flexibility.
Also, by doing a plugin, you won't have any problem updating HikaShop as you won't need to change any core files of HikaShop.