To my ear, heptameter works better as a meter in English than hexameter does. That is because the tet/tri combination is very common in English, and that sounds a lot like heptameter when you hear it rather than seeing it. Alicia Stallings has done a translation of Lucretius in fourteeners (rhymed heptameter couplets). I have translated a few Latin epigrams into heptameter, though I usually boil them down to pentameter. I generally avoid hexameter because it slows the line down so much. An occasional hexameter in a Spenserian stanza doesn't bother me, but I tend to find long poems in hexameter to be tedious.
Susan
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