Auto-exploding, in my experience, has never given me something I can use. It seems to apply a "distance" type of effect to any coincident constraints, and do a bunch of other strange things to other types of constraints. What I learned from countless attempts was to NOT use the auto-explode as a starting point for what I want. I instead create a new exploded state and manually move the components.
The biggest time-saver for me is to turn on/off the move option that is something like "move dependent" or "move children" so the bits you have constrained to a main component go along with that part when you move it. Other than that, it's a really tedious thing to get exploded assemblies exactly the way I want them.