Will dry salting make it more difficult to do natural rind treatments in hard cheeses?
Should the salt be devided into two saltings (like you do with blues) or is it ok to just crust the wheel?
In my experience, this isn't an issue at all. I dry-salt all my cheeses and almost never bother with brine (only when the brine is an infusion for the cheese with something cool mixed into it). It works perfectly fine (Tomer, you have tasted my cheese so you've tasted my Tommes so you know how they turned out dry-salted). I actually like it much better than brining. I feel that brining is a great idea if you are doing a batch with lots of wheels or you need to make identical cheeses every day and dump them all into a brine bath without thinking about it too much. In manufacturing environment brine makes a lot of sense: Make one brine, use it repeatedly. Save a lot on salt because one brine will serve many cheeses.
...BUT, for a single cheese (or for just a few wheels), you would actually use FAR more salt than you would need in dry-salting. Think of it; if you saturate 1 gallon brine to 24% you will use roughly 2 lbs / 1kg of salt. Is that worth it for one 4lbs / 2kg cheese? Dry salting the same cheese would only require 3.5 oz /100g salt! That's 90% less!!!) And then, there is the work; you need to adjust the pH and temperature, maybe test salinity or maintain the brine for future washes, use and sanitize extra dishes/bowls/utensils, take up room in the fridge if you want to keep the brine. None of this fuss when dry-salting, right?
And the cheese? Salt absorption, osmosis, phage protection and rind formation? Totally the same.
As for your question about double salting: You only need to do this with cheese with specidic recipe for curd salting and secondary rind salting. With very wet delicate cheeses such as Chèvre or Saint Marcellin, it is a common practice to salt only the top with 50% of the salt, wait 6 hours, turn and salt the not-yet-salted side which is now the new top. No need to do this with Tommes. My 5 cents