If you have a need to understand a pharmacopoeia assay, and you belong to an institution that subscribes to the current pharmacopoeia, you can easily email them, and ask any question you want. They're glad to help, and will provide peer-reviewed references.
If you have a job to do, you just follow these methods as written, because otherwise you're in violation of the current production standards, unless you validate an alternative method.
More than once, I've called the USP the "drunken frat boy's guide to chemistry" -- the methods seem to use the most obscure, archaic, chemicals and methods possible. I'm speaking mostly about the wet chemical methods for heavy metals, gradually being replaced by instrumental methods.
Only a real chemistry expert truly understand some of the most obscure assays. Why do you need to know why ammonia is added?