Refactor methods with large numbers of positional arguments

[rg936672]

What's the issue?

As suggested by pylint's R0917: too-many-positional-arguments, we should avoid having functions with a large number of positional arguments; functions which do should have a * inserted into their arguments list in order to mark later arguments as keyword-only.

This is a breaking change, however, so we will have to be careful when doing this.

When doing this, reduce the allowed number of positional arguments in .pylintrc to the default of 5.