I added the blockquote fence feature because I was getting tired of having to manually prefix every line with `>` when I was quoting a multiline message like an

I added the blockquote fence feature because I was getting tired of having to manually prefix every line with `>` when I was quoting a multiline message like an entire email. I picked `>>>` because it mirrored the triple-backtick syntax for fenced code blocks, and `>` was already used for single-line blockquotes. You can see the feature proposal I filed at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/16564 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/16564, and the merge request I submitted to implement the feature at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/3954 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/3954, for some more insight into how this came to be. I'm sad to hear that this feels like reinventing the wheel to you. From my perspective, there existed an imperfect wheel that we "invented" a more powerful alternative to.