We've been using pylint for a long time to help us improve the quality of our code.
Nevertheless, it's not new that meeting all its requirements is a very demanding task: some of its complains are very useful (unused imports, unused variables, too long functions, etc), but there are a lot more that we usually decide to ignore. The amount of ignored complains is not small: I think we need to add pylint: disable=... comments on every PR we open. See #283 as a recent example.

So it might be better to go with a better alternative: one that is faster to run, less strict and that allows us to control which types of check we want to run and which don't.
A good alternative would be to use flake8 extensions that take care of specific checks.

I'll leave a list of possible candidates, so feel free to add any extensions you think useful:

• flake8-bugbear: find likely bugs and design problems in your program.
• flake8-simplify: simplify your code.
• flake8-variables-names: make more readable variables names.
• flake8-functions: checks functions length, number of arguments, etc.
• flake8-builtins: Check for python builtins being used as variables or parameters.
• flake8-comprehensions: write better list/set/dict comprehensions.
• pep8-naming: Check your code against PEP 8 naming conventions.
• flake8-mutable: check against using mutable values as default arguments.
• flake8-rst-docstrings: validating Python docstrings markup as reStructuredText (RST)

Discarded:

• darglint: checks whether a docstring's description matches the actual function/method implementation
  • (takes too much time to run)
• flake8-tidy-imports: write tidier imports.
  • (not available through conda)
• flake8-isort: Use isort to check if the imports on your python files are sorted the way you expect.
  • (we will use isort, but we don't need to list all its complains, we just want it to solve them)
• flake8-black: Run black --check from within flake8 ecosystem.
  • (same as for flake8-isort)
• flake8-functions-names: provide better naming for functions.
  • (doesn't offer major features)
• flake8-requirements: checks/validates package import requirements. It reports missing and/or not used project direct dependencies.
  • (not available through conda)
• flake8-eradicate: find commented out (or so called "dead") code.
  • (the version available through conda is olddated)
• flake8-unused-arguments
  • (not available through conda)

The awesome-flake8-extensions is a good place for looking for flake8 extensions.