Refs #7422. A marginally hackish (but effective?) way to avoid having to unwrap None vars as args/kwags. This fixes an incorrect assumption that to have kwargs, one would first need to provide kwargs.
Refs #4686. From a cursory scan of this code, I believe the issues that the author raised are still valid.
Merge pull request #7852 from cachedout/develop

Refs #7422 and #4686