I had avoided to put in some kind of smoke in the grenade explosion because the smoke "overwrote" the other effects. Then my friend just told me to move the smoke a bit behind the stuff and I felt pretty dumb for not even thinking of that. Doh! So I added a bit of smoke and also tweaked the curves for other effects to make it more dynamic and less static and boring. 

I re-created the grenade explosion, using some stuff I learned while making the bullet impact. Screen algnment: PSA velocity is pretty useful for creating sparks and real sharp shrapnel. I also realized that I thought I could not use size over life for the bullet impact, but that was just me being silly. So I need to revisit that too. 

Continuing poking around in cascade using the primitive shape materials. This time, I attempted a bullet impact. Again, learned a lot while poking around with this one.

To familiarize myself with cascade I attempted a grenade explosion limiting myself to the square, circle and triangle shaped materials. I am also limited to only using these in cascade: 

Acceleration > Acceleration Drag
Color > Initial Color, Color Over Life
Lifetime > Lifetime
Light > Light
Location > Initial Location, Shapes
Rotation > Initial Rotation
Rotation Rate > Initial Rotation Rate
Orientation > Lock Axis
Size > Initial Size
Velocity > Initial Velocity, Velocity Over Life, Cone

Might not look much to the world, but I learned a lot poking around in Cascade. Will attempt bullet impacts next.