Aside: I think your quoting strategy is most confusing of all since you bother to use ">" once but then never again. Just use it for each paragraph you quote and don't worry about italicizing.

It wasn't until this post that I realized the italics of your upstream post wasn't your original content. I don't find it nice to squint at the text to see when it stops being italicized to know when you've started your post. But a final ">" is easy to see.