After four years I picked up the project used to generate smoke with a setup of Thinking Particles, Volumes and Prorender. old post here

By keeping only the TP setup and replacing the rest with Pyro and the Redshift render engine I obtained the following result. I would say that the step forward is more than evident, there is a beastly gap. Pyro is powerful, versatile and at the same time simple to use, which is absolutely not trivial.