"You're correct, but evidence for any lunar ice seems to be fading...unfortunately."

Well, I would agree that the idea of large slabs of ice sitting on the surface seems less likely. Or said differently:

"The Nature paper notes that if ice does exist at the lunar poles it would be considerably different from "the thick, coherent layers of ice observed in shadowed craters on Mercury," found in Arecibo radar imaging. "On Mercury what you see are quite thick deposits on the order of a meter or more buried by, at most, a shallow layer of dust."
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Nov03/radar.moonpoles.deb.html
[btw, not a recent article]

Though I'm not too sure whether or not Mercury has as much ice as that article seems to be suggesting.

I never thought of the Moon having thick layers of ice but rather if there were a fair amount of small ice ponds and/or lots of ice puddles then that would amount to an excessive amounts of lunar ice. And at that level of abundance it should be easily be minable.

And even if wettest the lunar regolith got was like somewhat dry dirt on Earth [around 5% water] then it could still be viable in terms of mining lunar water.

If it's 5% to a meter depth of regolith which is recoverable water, and you have just 1 sq km area at meter depth at this concentration, it's 50,000 tons of water. Or in dollar amount at $1000 per kg [million dollars per ton] 50 billion dollars worth of lunar water. This could be somewhere near the ballpark of being minable.

And if instead this wasn't mixed in but was a layer of ice on top of the regolith- so that's 5 cm [about 2"] thick on the top- that should be easily minable.
And very profitable.
And if it was 5 cm thick slab which was within a foot or so of the surface, it would also be almost as cheap to mine.

And if the entire floor of Shackleton crater has this type concentration of ice- it's trillion dollars of lunar water. And if there dozens of other craters with this type concentration you are getting to the tens of trillion dollars of lunar water.