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90% of any sim is building the sources and frequently you have to use those sources to define the initial shape of the sim because sims are not designed to handle them - for example, all detonations are supersonic, that's what detonation means (subsonic detonations are called deflagrations). Supersonic flows are highly compressible, they result in shockwaves, which most fluid sim software does not handle AT ALL, so you're left modeling them with particle & volume sources, leaving the fluid sim to handle the subsonic aftermath.

Pyro isn't anything magic, it's really just wrappers around a standard fluid solver, so knowing how these things work internally would be enormously helpful, but that's pretty nasty from a math standpoint - Rob Bridson (one of the principle authors of Naiad/Bifrost) has a book out, but it's not for the faint of heart - https://www.amazon.com/Simulation-Computer-Graphics-Robert-Bridson/dp/1568813260 .

Fundamentally, a fluid solver is its velocity field, that's the fiddly part of it. The individual parts of a fluid solve ultimately come down to how they affect the velocity field, everything else is really just HOW they affect that field.

Disturbance is a "random" value at every voxel, turbulence is a curl noise evaluated somewhat smoothly over the fluid's domain, same for shredding, vorticity confinement and every other operation you can control (word of advice, turn off all the shape operators on the pyro solver node and add individual gas disturbance or gas turbulence nodes into the 'velocity update' input).

Pyro is fairly heavy, so is FLIP, but if you understand the underlying math, they're generally not too bad, but in my experience, most people just know which shelf buttons to push and get completely screwed when they don't work as expected.