Do you remember all that dust the Apollo astronauts kicked up on the moon? It look pretty loosely bound to me. I think you're on the right approach with small electric caterpilars and conveyor belts to move the lunar material. A couple meters of dust piled on top of the dome should add a fair amount of shielding and you don't have any wind to contend with. They'd want to put the landing pad a reasonable distance from the habitation modules, anyway.

I'd like to see a lunar lander capable of carrying a good payload to the surface, say 10-20 metric tons. I first envisioned a configuration roughly resembling the old Sikorsky CH-54 Flying Crane helicopter with the engines mounted outboard to allow carrying large external loads. However, this might not be a very safe configuration, especially if an engine failed. Instead of a single large payload in the middle of the craft, it might be a lot safer to mount the engines near the middle and use split payloads outboard of the engines. I'd use at least 4 engines, each with enough surplus power to make up for the loss of a single engine and still land or to drop the payload and abort to orbit.

The first landings would deliver habitation modules, perhaps derived from the proposed inflatable Hab module for the ISS. After a base camp is established, subsequent landings would deliver things like rovers, caterpilars, etc.