Code Review and Cleanup

[whitlockjc]

As part of working on #1, a lot of code was kept logically together to make reading the code easier. This means that it might not necessarily be the most performant, for example we might be processing the same object more than once in cases. There are also other places where code could be cleaned up to be more consistent, written to add/avoid extra sanity checks, etc. Now that we have a working test suite covering all known validation needs, we can easily cleanup/refactor without worry of breaking something.