What a wealth of info and discussion! I particularly like the advice, "Rhyme on the obscenity." (Could we get that on Able Muse t-shirts?) And I believe, Carol, that Susan means you don't add a concept not in the original wording. It might well take two words, or a whole phrase, to carry across a single Latin word into English, of course. Or a whole line might get condensed into a two-word phrase. But you don't want to pad with an adjective where the original has none.
My notion of my own riming, not very well thought out, mind you, is that I tend to rime phrases rather than words. (Frost may also have said this--if so, am not meaning to plagiarize.) It is rare that I get to the second of a riming pair and am down to the word itself. This is why I do not believe it is really that valid to talk about "tired" rimes. The "tiredness" of them comes from context--a whole tired metaphor, a tired way of using them--rather than the words themselves. I can point out plenty of good uses of breath/death, for example--say in Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz." Talking about tired rimes to me is like saying that the letter "e" is trite, since it is used all the time.
I don't use riming dictionaries, but this is not an ethical decision. I just don't find them terribly useful. I find them limiting. There are plenty of rimes not in riming dictionaries. But then, possibly, haven't looked into the right ones. Again, though, I am rarely searching for one word.
I also have a theory that if you are stuck on a rime, the problem is the line you set up the rime with. Rethink the pair, as a unit. This is a corollary to my theory that a poem tends to have a technical hitch at the precise point it has a bigger more problematic weakness (flaws come in groups).
Am also a big fan of (consonantal) slant rime, which has a completely different flavor. But that belongs to another discussion.
Rime comes pretty easily to me, and I have to make myself abstain from time to time--not easy. On the other hand, am not interested in intricate rimed forms. For me, a very intricately rimed stanza becomes too much like a crossword puzzle--intellectually stimulating as a game, but stultifying to other faculties.
I have learned a heck of a lot by working on a rimed translation of Lucretius--7,000 odd lines, of which have done about 5,500--getting better, I hope, as I go along. A bit like working a crossword puzzle (that image again) for which one is not sure there is a solution. As Susan points out, the content is a given, which is naturally limiting. And one does want to rime on the important words, give them that punch. In the odd moment of despair I have turned to riming dictionaries in this project. And they have never offered me a solution. In the end, again, it was a matter of rethinking the entire couplet. Well, hey, there are only so many rimes for "void." And believe me, I know them all.
What I love about rime, though, is its ability to surprise--particularly the poet!
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