Broadly three things here:

* disable W504 which seems a bit whacko
* remove a bunch of `as e` expressions from exception handlers that don't use
  them
* use `r""` for strings which include backslashes

Also, we don't use pep8 any more, so we can get rid of the duplicate config
there.

Since, for better or worse, we seem to have configured isort to generate
89-character lines, pycharm is now complaining at me that our lines are too
long.

So, let's configure pep8 to behave consistently with flake8.

Apparently flake8 v3 doesn't like trailing comments on config settings.

Also remove the pep8 config, which didn't work (because it was missing W503)
and duplicated the flake8 config. We don't use pep8 on its own, so the config
was duplicative.

pycharm supports them so there is no need to use the other format.

Might as well convert the existing strings to reduce the risk of
people accidentally cargo culting the wrong doc string format.