Thank you for your contribution to Astropy! 🌌 This checklist is meant to remind the package maintainers who will review this pull request of some common things to look for.

• Do the proposed changes actually accomplish desired goals?
• Do the proposed changes follow the Astropy coding guidelines?
• Are tests added/updated as required? If so, do they follow the Astropy testing guidelines?
• Are docs added/updated as required? If so, do they follow the Astropy documentation guidelines?
• Is rebase and/or squash necessary? If so, please provide the author with appropriate instructions. Also see instructions for rebase and squash.
• Did the CI pass? If no, are the failures related? If you need to run daily and weekly cron jobs as part of the PR, please apply the "Extra CI" label. Codestyle issues can be fixed by the bot.
• Is a change log needed? If yes, did the change log check pass? If no, add the "no-changelog-entry-needed" label. If this is a manual backport, use the "skip-changelog-checks" label unless special changelog handling is necessary.
• Is this a big PR that makes a "What's new?" entry worthwhile and if so, is (1) a "what's new" entry included in this PR and (2) the "whatsnew-needed" label applied?
• At the time of adding the milestone, if the milestone set requires a backport to release branch(es), apply the appropriate "backport-X.Y.x" label(s) before merge.

feels for at least a few of them it should have been replacing if k with if k is not None

I'm not sure what you mean, but these are not equivalent. I do believe k or thing is exactly equivalent to k if k else thing; they both rely on k's truthiness and will evaluate it the same way.

Slightly more brainpower to parse but less code is good, right? 🎲

I know the code is equivalent; my point was really that I think in a few cases the existing code was (subtly) wrong. Anyway, this can be sorted if we ever get the none-aware operators...

the existing code was (subtly) wrong

Sounds like a follow-up bug fix PR?