Quality Improvements

The existing python codebase has some quality issues that should be addressed. This was discovered recently when we used the SDAAgentReview for the first time in pipeline. It did an overall analysis and brough up many things unrelated to the PR but should be addressed.
Creating this separate task to look at the recommendations/improvements brought up by the agent and fix them in a follow up release as the current one is getting too big and not possible to address everything in one single PR.