Looking at the website you linked, I dunno. I get the impression that HDR is for reasonable dynamic range differences, to pick up detail in shadow areas or in an underexposed highlight. I'm looking at 12 f-stops difference between the moon and the foreground... that's more than 4,000 times brighter.
Although the examples at that web site mostly conform to narrower dynamic ranges like you say, I believe that much wider ranges can be done with the same technique.
An acquaintance of mine did that sort of thing for a college thesis project, the results were quite impressive.
One other difficulty would be that the moon simply was not in the frame when the photo was taken.
Yup. That's a completely different problem, separate from the dynamic range issue: The perceived size of the moon in photos versus when you look at it with the naked eye. When you look at the moon in the sky, especially near the horizon, your brain interprets it as being much larger than it really is. Usually, when someone tries to photograph the moon over a landscape, the moon ends up being a tiny dot in the frame. And thus, usually, if you see images of the moon over the landscape where the moon looks big, (like
this), odds are they also pasted the moon into place, just like you tried to do. (Of course, they were using better tools and had more experience with pasting in images.)
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