Hi Ethan,
I am happy to see your approach of translate IRAF into Python! Keep however in mind that IRAF has some 100,000 lines of code, so this is (unless you have some automation) a very long-standing task.
I opened this issue because I would like to ask you to report any issues you found by reviewing the original code to https://github.com/iraf-community/iraf, so that they can be fixed there (I am the maintainer of iraf-community).
Best regards
Ole