Mining and processing .dat files using heuristics or approximation algorithms

I’m considering some ideas to consider approximations to speed up the convergence of finding a nonce. I’m relatively new to technical details. It’s great to see that some community members have built code to learn mining steps step by step. So, out of curiosity I went further and created a parallel version of the code here – https://github.com/HugoXOX3/PythonBitcoinMiner

While looking into where to send updates, I discovered that the code uses a Stratum pool. This got me wondering – let’s say we successfully mine a block (I know it’s rare, but just hypothetically), will the reward be shared across the pool? If you’re using public-pool.io:21496

Is it possible to mine without involving pools (using heuristics)?

Does public-pool.io:21496 work or is it a testnet?

The second set of questions concerned data files. We wanted historical data of all mining activities as version, prev_hash, merkle_root, time, bits, nonce, block_hash.

I tried using bitcoind (installed via brew) and it shows the .dat file but fails to retrieve it