Feature/looking into argparse again

[windoverwater]

This is way to large to review but creating a PR anyway. This branch contains:

• the initial work to support ticket based contests
• an red of the move of argparse into the cli package
• a manual merge of the feature/split-cli-and-operations branch
• a removal of a few design warts that should never have been written
• various repairs via manual testing of all of the above