[jen20]

Typically, italic formatting indicates gentle emphasis, bold formatting indicates strong emphasis. Given this, * and * make sense. However, typically people use _ for gentle emphasis in Markdown, which makes _even more_ sense. Be careful not to confuse specification of rendering,

As for - and >, they've been in use in plain text email clients for bulleted lists and quotations for 35 years now [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#:~:text=The%20co...

[DidYaWipe]

I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that the example I provided is not intuitively recognizable as a block quote. And it gets worse when you have more nested decorations.