[davidinosauro]

> At least in my experience, I don't see a lot of trouble with number vs string in CSV data.

I definitely had my fair share of trouble with locale-defined number format. Importing a column where a thousand is spelled "1.000", any integer between 1000 and 999999 would be wrongly parsed as a float between 1 and 999, while for any other number (like "0,1" for one tenth, "1.000.000" for a million, "1.000,56" for a thousand euros and change) the parser would give up and keep the string.

I usually have had more luck importing as text, then doing some string replacement of separators before finally converting to number.