The vertex value will indeed be interpolated when arriving to the fragment shader, so for example having two connected vertices, one with texture slot id=2 and one with id=17 will give the fragment shader everything in between 2 and 17 (including decimal values in between) depending on pixel position, causing lots of texture slots to be walked through on the way.
A quick though might be to actually describe the amount of each texture slot in each vertex, using a 0...1 style, ie. doing it "in parallel", in an order that is always fixed. A vertex typically connects to 6 other vertices (but can connect to more), so at most 6 textures would in that case be involved in the blending at any time. You'd however describe the amount of all textures in each vertex; those that are 0 you'd simply skip in the fragment shader and maybe count on doing at most 6 lookups.
A question that comes next is how many "floating point" channels can you allocate in the vertex data? Not too many, i guess, but at least a few, depending on what else you need to bake in the vertex data.
Having said that, i could point out that you maybe do not need a fine resolution of 1/256 for the "amount of each texture"? If you are willing to have for example 1/16 as resolution, you can bake in the texture amounts for 16 different textures in one 8-bit "float-part", since it can hold 256 different integer values. In that case, you could describe the blending of max 16 texture materials in for example normal.w. Or have 8 channels, each with a resolution of 1/32. Ofc you need to do some bit maths in the shader (and when building the mesh), but that's the fun part right? :-)
Edit:
About the segment above, i must admit a duration-of-a-shower amount of brainwork did not reveal any good solutions as to how to control the splitting of a single float so that one is able to grab individual segments of it's bit-sequence while GPU is interpolating it. This would be a question for the bit-guys, ie. a separate issue to ask the encryption and compression experts. Can you interpolate a 32-bit floating point value AAAA (4 bytes), so that individual bytes of it's bit representation remain decodeable along the interpolation and all become BBBB separately at the other end?