Its good you shearing your way of working but I am sorry its more a tut on how it work in foot and inches than real world scale.
I always worked in real world scale, never had a problem within Maya and not met anyone who has a problem doing so. But then I work in CM and Meters. Texturing,SFX and lighting all work correctly and even importing my models in to 3d Max and C4D works 100% (Apart from Max wanting Z to be upwards - silly buggers).

But as a architectural designer how is it your unable to just convert imperial units to metric instead of struggling ??? This really is not as big a problem your making out it is and it most deferentially not impossible.