After a few lower res tests, I find it best to work in a res close to your final, but work on a very small patch and just become a robot, tweak an attr, do a quick test, understand what raising or lowering a little does, re-read some docs, scour some old tuts for nuggets, do more tests, repeat, a lot. A LOT. After a while you will know within a few frames if something is completely off or not.
Or Wedge like there is no tomorrow.
But for initial tests and understanding what to tweak, I find it just easier to do small tests quick then once you "feel" it, wedge a few variations.
Also as far as reseeding, you really need to do some tests and it depends on what you need, like an ocean vs a blood splat and how to use reseeding and oversampling. Sometimes its better to use very low thresholds. Again tweak a little and notice how .5 vs .1 reseeds, watching the Geo Spreadsheet. See how many points per frame you're blasting into your sim. Is it way too many? Tweak!