Leonard J Greenspoon, in 'Between Alexandria and Antioch: Jews and Judaism in the Hellenistic Period', published in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, page 322, describes the book of Daniel as a novel. As long as we see the book in this light, we can read into Daniel 9:24 whatever we believe the author intended, although we should be cautious of treating the passage as a prophecy of future events.
Rendering seventy weeks to mean 490 years appears to be what the author meant, since he was writing around 167 BCE, just after the Maccabaean revolt, and the period of seventy weeks of years appears to refer to the period from the destruction of Solomon's Temple in 588 BCE up to his own time and beyond. In historical terms, this was really only a period of 323 years, but the author was uncertain of many historical facts surrounding the Babylonian Exile (for example, Daniel 5:31 tells us Darius, not Cyrus, conquered Babylon).
The second century CE, rabbinic work Seder Olam Rabbah also interpreted the prophecy of seventy weeks in Daniel 9:24–27 as referring to a period of 490 years, with a "week" being interpreted as a period of seven years, which would pass between the destruction of the First and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Wikipedia explains this is used to date the destruction of the First Temple to 423 BCE, but this is about 165 years after the current scholarly dating of the event. This is in the nature of hermeneutics, but certainly not "good hermeneutics."
Walvoord's Major Bible Prophecies concludes that the supposed prophecy can be validated if the 490 period begins in 445 BCE, when Artaxerxes provided some minor assistance to the Jews, and ends in 33 CE with the crucifixion. This is poor hermeneutics because the events of 445 were not particularly auspicious, and we can not even be sure that the crucifixion took place in 33 CE, even if that is the year preferred by many.