I'm curious as to why you find this unreadable... it renders pretty readably for me? (https://pasteboard.co/HlW8oMh.png).

As far as I can tell, formatdoc[0] doesn't provide a "semantically correct" method for formatting quotes. Hence, the age-old usenet quote (as codified in RFC3676[1]) seems to me to be the best way of indicating a quotation, and rendering it via a verbatim block ensures that the line-based quotation indication isn't disrupted by the text all being in a <p> tag when rendered in HTML.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt