Alan has made many very good points. Steele's system, for one thing, is useful to scholars, and to analysis of poetry, but muddies the waters for novices, and is far too complex to think about consciously when composing. (Also, it is rather arbitrary, I think, in assigning 4 gradations of stresses.) Personally, I dread to see people just learning to write metrical verse using such terms as phyrrics (and amphibrachs and paeons and minor ionics). Eeek! It is best, I think, when starting off to think of number of stresses or beats, rather than fancy Greek misnomers (and to count off on your fingers, for instance, rather than marking it on paper). Meter should be visceral in its composition, not intellectual, though of course it is open to intellectual analysis and interpretation.
Above all, rules are gleaned from what works in great poetry. NOT the other way around. Go with your ear. But make sure that ear is well-schooled through lots of reading. Anything is permissible IF you can carry it off. Poets should learn "prosody" from poetry, not from books on prosody (though books may be helpful used in addition).
(Having said all that, a tried and true subsitution, where you cannot go wrong, and one I so WISH I saw more of on the metrical boards is the trochaic inversion in the first foot of ip -- or you could say it sounds like a dactyl followed by trochees. It is elegant and very, very koscher. Take a look in Shakespeare's sonnets. They are all over the place!)
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