@berberous, it's good advice and welcome feedback. Thank you.

I just tend to write the way I talk and using punctuation, speech marks and italics/bold is the only way I can think of to convey intonation/meaning. I will try harder to avoid the excessive use of emphasis, as you say it detracts from the writing/reading.

PG almost never uses any sort of emphasis in his essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html so I'm going to wean myself off it.

I am genuinely grateful for the feedback. =)

I completely agree. To me, 9 formatting changes in a single sentence, e.g. in the second sentence of that GitHub repo readme, is incredibly excessive. While the comment you replied to isn't nearly as extreme, it still has a similar issue of too many formatting changes per paragraph.