Wondering how good muzzle flashes are made

I actually think your smoke looks quite alright for just photoshop work.
I would definitely make the emissive flames much brighter for the flame burst. You could just create some separate particls for just the fire burst. You can also try to add a ‘Blackbody’ node to your smoke, which kinda simulates the fire/smoke behavior on a black-white texture.

If you want to go more realistic/sophisticated there are a few tools commonly used for smoke simulations, which shoud give you decent results fast.
-Houdini (hard to use, sophisticated, higher priced)
-Embergen (easy to use and fast, medium priced)
-Fluid Ninja (easy to use, more stylised, cheap)
There’s loads of ways to make your smoke blend better with the environment, mainly it’s all about how the smoke is being lit. You can fake the lighting, or you can make the engine light them properly.
There are a few posts on here about this already, for example here:

and here: