I love jupyter notebooks, but unfortunately the code editor is unusable to me. I cannot stand the bizarre parenthesis auto-completion, and the autoindentation settings; and there's no easy way to remove them.

I feel the same way. One workaround is that some editors have a plugin. Emacs has a mode called ein that is fantastic. As you poke around getting the snippets to work, you can cut/paste into a different file/buffer. After you start the Jupiter notebook copy the login token, run: ein:notebooklist-login then ein:notebooklist-open and away you go.