I took Carbonfiberboy's "correct tension" to mean the manufacturer's suggested tension (see below). There is no manufacturer's "suggested" tension that is meaningful. Basically, wheelbuilding is more art than science. You are correct in your assessment but there just no hard numbers that you can turn to.
Where do you find the "max specified by the rim manufacturer". I have yet to see any kind of chart for a given rim much less a /hub/spoke combination. There are sometimes generic tensions like Velocity's "110
kgf and 130kgf" which covers 15 models of rims and 38 different diameters. A Velocity A23 is very different in construction and configuration than a DeepV or NoBS but they use the same spoke tension. That doesn't seem right.
Mavic doesn't even go that far and list no spoke tension ranges for their rims that are easy to find. If it were so important, I'd think they would put it right up front.
Park Tool has
some tension recommendations but they are rather broad suggestions...and I look on them only as "suggestions". Giving a range like for the Bontrager rims, for example, of from 50 to 130 kgf is far too broad to be useful. That's 490 N to 1274 N (110 lb to 286 lb). That's a very broad range.
I also happen to work with people who operate a shop and not one of them can tell me what spoke tension to use. It's simple not listed.
Well I'm not sure what you are saying makes no difference. All of those factors make a difference to the durability of a wheel and they make a difference to the way the wheel is built. Again, there is no "specified" tension for rims...only ranges. And just running the tension up on spokes until they are as tight as you can get them can lead to cracking of the rim is some cases. The rim construction will make a difference.
That's only stiffness in one direction. Wheels are subjected to bending forces in multiple directions. Making the rim taller makes it stiffer only in the vertical direction not in the horizontal. The rim can be bent out of plane fairly easily and would be if it didn't have spokes resisting that out of plane bending. And the increase in stiffness is fairly small since aluminum (and most wheels are still aluminum) is fairly soft.
But even when the rim is taller, there's really no advantage to it being stiffer vertically. That's because the rim isn't attached to the spoke. The rim floats on the spoke and even though the rim is stiffer, it is still deflected upward when loaded. The spoke detensions and retensions as the contact patch is loaded and unloaded. The spoke still does all the work of keeping the wheel strong.
People seem to think that potholes are the cause of broken spokes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hitting potholes at speed doesn't break spokes because the spokes aren't the thing hitting the pothole. Again, the rim is floating on the spokes. A pothole causes a momentary upward deflection of the rim and detensioning of the spoke followed by a retensioning. The cycle of tensions changes on the spoke are what break spokes and breakage of spokes usually isn't something that happens because of a one time event.