Use the most concise and pythonic way to create dictionaries and lists

[ThibFrgsGmz]

Originating Project/Creator
Affected Component
Affected Architectures(s)
Related Issue(s)
Has Unit Tests (y/n)
Builds Without Errors (y/n)
Unit Tests Pass (y/n)
Documentation Included (y/n)

---

Change Description

This PR includes the following change:

• [Replaces conditional assignment to a variable with an if expression ref
• Replaces lists created with list() with [] ref

Rationale

Doing it this way has the added benefit of being a small performance improvement:

$ python3 -m timeit "x = list()"
5000000 loops, best of 5: 63.3 nsec per loop

$ python3 -m timeit "x = []"
20000000 loops, best of 5: 15.8 nsec per loop

Testing/Review Recommendations

Let CI run

Future Work

(void)