STYLE ignore no-else-* checks, + assorted cleanups
@jbrockmendel 's mentioned he's not keen on the`no-else-*` pylint checks, and to be fair, they are kinda nitpicky. Hard to imagine that they could ever help uncover a bug

Let's keep them turned off then. Have added a section of "intentionally turned off checks"
can we add this stuff to the pre-commit hook so i can catch it locally instead of in the CI? could do, but @jorisvandenbossche had brought up that it's a pretty slow hook (esp. compared with the other ones)

I'll see if there's a way to speed it up @jbrockmendel @jorisvandenbossche I don't there's much that can be done to speed up pylint - they say it's expected that it's slow because it's thorough.

And to be fair, it has been helping find actual issues.

To not disrupt local development, but to also help keep catch issues, I'd suggest:
- keep pylint only running in CI with `stages: [manual]` (though note that you can  still trigger it locally if you wish, with `pre-commit run pylint --hook-stages manual --all-files`)
- turn off the more nitpicky pylint checks such as the `no-else-*` ones, which probably don't help find issues anyway > pre-commit run pylint --hook-stages manual --all-files

this will help me out, thanks.  The pain point for me is having stuff pass locally and then fail on the CI for some nitpicky reason. cool, so if we remove the nitpicky checks, then local development should still be fast and CI should only fail for reasons which are potential sources of bugs (e.g. `redefined-outer-name`), but you can still run these checks manually if you wish

and if the are failures because of other reasons deemed to be nitpicky, we can add them back to `pyproject.toml` in the `# intentionally turned off` section

any objections to moving along with this? > any objections to moving along with this?

nope > pre-commit run pylint --hook-stages manual --all-files

Trying this I'm getting `pre-commit: error: unrecognized arguments: --hook-stages manual` sorry, typo, I meant `--hook-stage` > > any objections to moving along with this?
> 
> nope

cool, thanks - if someone approves I'll merge then thanks for reviewing!